What did it take to win a Week 1 Rebound Rumble match?

[Ian Curtis]

"I'm not looking for the best players -- I'm looking for the right ones." -Herb Brooks, Coach US 1980 Olympic Hockey Team

Week 2 gets to play the game that Week 1 gets to figure out. What a week it was! Below is some analysis that I hope will help you as you get ready to rumble this week.

Included is all Week 1 regionals (Israel not included), and events (MAR & FIM). This includes 676 qualifying matches. First up, a boxplot of scores, divided into winning/tying alliances and losing/tying alliances. Winning and losing in this piece always mean winning/tying and losing/tying, as it was mildly easier to do that than throw out all of the ties. (4% of matches ended in a tie)



A couple of key observations. Winning alliances tend to score a lot more points than losing ones -- since alliances are fairly randomly selected, some biasing factor (hint: think endgame!) likely seperates them. Winning alliances scored on average 22 points per match, whereas losing ones scored 8.7. That is, the winning alliance had to only balance one robot to win the average match last week!

Next up are the distributions of winning and losing scores. I find it interesting that while winning alliance scores are fairly normal, losing alliance scores are significantly skewed.


Basically, this drives home the point that teams did not need to score many points to win matches. Less than 5% of losing alliances scored more than 25 points!


Winning alliances tended to do better, but the mean was still 22 as mentioned above.

Adding to the two together, you can see the distribution for total alliance scores, which had a mean of 15.4 as others have mentioned.


A couple of parting thoughs based on these

1) Give yourself plenty of time to balance the bridges! I can't tell you how many points scored this weekend were bridge points because I haven't gotten a parsed copy of the twitter feed yet, but scores are so low that they can't have been an overwhelming proportion. Watching the webcasts lots of teams appeared to shortchange themselves, but I think for most robots time spent balancing the bridge is better spent than time chasing after balls.

2) Teams are not scoring a lot of points. If you miss a ball, it takes a long time to chase after it. Only take shots you are sure of. Again watching webcasts, it seemed like most teams were not playing defense in qualifying matches -- use this to your advantage! coughFENDERcough

3) Don't overreach! Set a simple, robust strategy and follow it. In line with #2, I think a defender going back and forth along the fender will be a big obstacle for a lot of teams.