Mentors Not Reading Rules

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I can't stress this enough. The Tournament is always the first section I read. If your goal is to win an event, you need to understand what it takes to win the event. By reading the Tournament section you learn by what criteria teams are ranked and how matches are win. Once you understand this information, you can read the rest of the rules and start brainstorming strategies to maximize these criteria. FRC changes their ranking criteria regularly enough that it's essential to make yourself aware at the very beginning of every season.

The longer you've been in FRC, the better this idea gets. You can read through the robot rules and start turning the wheels on some initial strategy ideas based on approaches you took in the past to a game that looks similar, only to realize how meaningless an approach to the game can be because how it wouldn't do squat for your position on the leaderboards. (2006 didn't have a little white bridge that held the same value as a win, iirc)