The Paradox of Cycling

[IKE]

An important thing to remember about cycling is its interplay with Defense. Slowing a a small bit can usually cause them to lose 1 cycle. It takes a conisderable amount of defense to slow them down enough to miss another cycle.
For instance, A cycler that consistently does 5 cycles and hangs may require 10 seconds to hang, and therefore has 110 seconds to do 5 cycles with an average cycle time 22 seconds. Holding this robot up with 10 seconds of defense will move it down to 4 cycles. The trick is, to get them below 4 cycles will require an additional 12 to 20 seconds of "hold-up". While that doesn't sound like much, it is actually a considerable amount of time for defense to stop a robot.
If you have 3 robots that can consistently do 4 cycles with defense... you can pretty well deplete the frisbee supply, and you are very difficult to defend.
In my opinion, this explains the World Champions a lot. They had 3 excellent cyclers that could consistenly get 6 cycles each if that was their primary job. This meant that if they each did 4 or 5, the supply should be diminished and there is a lot of extra time for the cyclers to play D or otherwise screw up their oppoennts offense. If one of their teamates dropped a cycle, the other two teammates had capacity to take up the slack.