Best Ways to Scout

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Boltman

Best way to scout is "eyes on bots", excel sheets , pen and paper note taking. I use a cheap thin spiral binder and highlighters . My awesome scouts also take copious notes. I started the scouting department from scratch last year. Scouting is equal to engineering and drive team IMO and the entire team agrees with me they love it. Not only for winning games but building alliances to have the best chance at a win.

A field of 60 with 10-12 games is not indicative of a high level of need for data analysis and is highly susceptible to schedule pairings more than raw data from stats. Eyes first, notes second and data on first night to see if there are any you missed. Usually not the case...might be one or two but then you watch on day 2 and go "hmm wonder how they got that stat?" eyes don't lie like stats do.

I don't get alliance captains that don't already know their second picks instantly of a pick list, other than they must not scout at all and ultimately they exit in QF.

We've successfully set up a scouting system that can use relatively inexperienced students to keep quantitative counts. We have to work to find the other 2 superscouts who make qualitative judgements. Comparing our system to what we see at regionals and even Champs, we believe having a more rigorous system if more fruitful. For example, we were able to get our 10th overall pick (even accounting for alliance captains) at Sacramento as our 2nd pick. 971 and us use a similar rigorous system and our draft lists agreed quite well. (5274 should thank 971 for jumping them up a spot on the list.)

We know who we DON'T want by the end of the second day, but our mid-field list where our 2nd picks reside is much more cluttered and subject to revision. (We've gotten by the QFs every competition since 2013... )