(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?

[TDav540]

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

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.

It all depends on your goals. Some teams want to make semis, some finals, some win. Some just want to make the playoffs and have a good time.

Additionally, although it may seem to us (especially in hindsight) that a team's picks didn't make sense, they may have a completely valid reason. Some teams have untapped potential (I've worked with a few of those cases), others have (or at least think they have) good chemistry, others still have complimentary strategies. It may be an incorrect assumption or decision, but it's what that team believed at the time.

How often do teams make the right pick? There are enough variables to consider that really teams should be just looking to make their best possible pick. At the end of the day, doesn't the "right" pick depend on the result?