(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by jajabinx124

I'm not sure if I've seen any declining based on this reason, but I declined the 2nd seeded alliance's invite (as 2052's alliance selection representative) at the 2015 10,000 lakes regional because I wanted our team to captain the alliance to get to the finals to guarantee ourselves a wildcard. I had a few other reasons to decline because I knew I had 1/2 better options to pick after declining them, but getting the wildcard was the pushing factor since the first wildcard is awarded starting with the opposing alliance captain to the wildcard team on the winning alliance.

At the 2015 10,000 lakes regional, the 2 best teams joined together to form the no.1 seed (525 and 2502) and since 525 had won the Northern Light's regional previously, they had a wildcard. Strategically I chose to decline the 2nd seeds invite because I felt like I could built an alliance strong enough and go to the finals to meet the 1st seed and guarantee my team a spot at champs via wildcard. (which at that point it was pretty evident the 1st seed with 525 and 2502 was the powerhouse alliance that had the best shot at winning the regional)

Reason I decided to mention this is because after I declined on stage I'm pretty sure half of the people in the stands (including most of my own team members) were pretty confused as to what the heck I as doing and probably thought I was being irrational.. but I do think this is more of a unique reason that a team chose to decline another team's invite.

I also took a whack at reviewing alliance selection results from this year. The way I did it was to say that a pick made sense if there was some way in which to rank teams in which the one that they chose was in the top five of those still available. I found a ton of picks that I just could not account for.

I thought I'd see a couple alliances per event that was just doing pure OPR based picking or pure rank, but it turned out that for the events that I was looking at those weren't the case at all. And a lot of them didn't make any more sense after looking at scouting data. But I did find that there was a positive correlation between alliances that made picks that I could figure out and advancing further in the tournament.

It seemed that many captains picked so badly that they would have increased their odds of winning the tournament if they had just been picking based on rank. I can only conclude that are large number of picks are often made for reasons other than maximizing the odds of winning the tournament.

And I think there are sometimes good reasons for trying to do something other maximize odds of winning, like the one that jajabinx124 cited with the wildcard system. And similarly to the wildcard system, in the district system how far you advance in the tournament matters, not just winning or losing the event.

I'm not sure how common this sort of strategy is however. For example, during the PNW championship I knew exactly how many points my team had to get to give us a 100% chance of making worlds, but talking with some other teams in attendance it seemed like a lot of folks didn't really grasp the point system well enough to figure out how well they had to do to get invited to worlds, let alone what that would imply strategically.

One extra note I will give is that it was easier to predict selections as the level of play increased. For example, while some in the audience and even the MC found the alliance selection on Hopper surprising it really shouldn't have been a surprise to any of those involved.