FRC Blogged - What Do You Think? The ‘Invite to Decline’ Strategy

[nicholsjj]

Originally Posted by Racer26

I see a lot of talk about so-called "scorched earth" strategies.

I've never really seen one in practice.

About the closest I've seen was 1815's selections at GTREast 2012. Due to the coop bridge, and some lucky scheduling, 1815 ended up ranked significantly higher than their robot performance should have put them, but they were still not #1. They were declined by 4 or 5 teams before someone agreed to play with them. Their initial strategy had they seeded #1 was to break up 1114/2056/610/188.

Newton in 2006 also comes to mind as a true scorching. I do not disagree with the practice at all. A team has earned the right to invite what ever team they want as a potential alliance partner. It does make the alliance selections fell "awkward" when teams do start declining, but it is a two way street. I expected it to happen on curie this year and was surprised when 1717 or 1310 didn't accept just because they were in the middle of the picks.(At that point it's better to decline from a lower position due to two close picks and a higher position due to the immediate picks IMO). I talked to Micheal a bit on it after they had made the picks and he said that they felt confident playing with any of the declined teams had they actually accepted their offer.

As for the co-op bridge in 2012...Let's just say that I think it caused more anti-GP that promoting GP, which is unfortunately very sad.