Philly top 5

[379Robocat]

What a lot of people don 't seem to realize or notice is that there is a lot of robots that are good this year. This year I know shooting in the center goal seems to be everyones concern but what people need to watch out are for the strong defensive robots. We have competed in 2 regionals so far and it seems that a good alliance needs to consist of two shooters and a strong defensive corner goal scorer. This year everyone seems to want to leave us out of decent robots. I'm not sure if it is just because our reputation of not having a good consistent robot every year or what. In the two regionals we seemed to be on the top list of defensive corner goal shooters but the top teams don't seem to notice us. When picking alliances if there is a team that is not in the top 15 but are good is probably because they either didn't have a strong alliance or not all the robots showed up. I'm not trying to brag about our robot or anything but we are a really strong robot with 2-speed transmissions, fast and good scorers. On that note here are my top 5:

272 (again seen them in cleveland)
365 (always good robot)
341 (but looks like it needs hp to load the robot and that can be stopped)
157 (seems to have a good solid robot)
177 (good corner scorer but needs to watch not going into corner goal to far)

These are my picks based on past preformances and websites. In previous competitions it was all michgan teams except us or all teams from ohio or west/north west. Good luck to everyone and see you thursday.

[Freddy Schurr]

103- Amazing Shooter
365- Great Hopper with Shooter
84- Our alliance partners at PARC last year and overall amazing team
486- Amazing at NJ, the collector and the shooter work good.
433- THE FIREBIRDS, that all I will say!
204- My team, hard-working students and rocking mentors combine make for a superb team.
1394- Is all together the word of Gracious Professionalism!
1712- Rookie Team, can't wait to see them in action.

Other teams, 316, 56, 177, 272, 341, and 303 I liked!

[Jeremy L]

"When picking alliances if there is a team that is not in the top 15 but are good is probably because they either didn't have a strong alliance or not all the robots showed up."

The beautiful thing about alliance selections this year with the 1-8 then 8-1 picking is the balance that can occur on alliances as opposed to previous years. As for our team at UTC, we had a pretty interesting time picking our 5th seed alliance. Aces high (176) was our first pick, and was not in the top 10 after qualifiers, and our second pick was the Uberbots (1124), which finished the qualifiers 34th! After winning the regional and defeating the 1, 3 and 4 seeds along the way, it became clear that good alliances were determined by good robots, not seeding. A robot that is consistent can easily end up in first place or last place, but performance in elimination rounds depends on the individual robot's qualification performance, not whether or not it got lucky in qualifier pairings.

Scouting has always been an integral part of a successful alliance, and our team's method in particular has become one of our strong points. Knowing your allies and your opponents equally well can be the difference between victory and defeat.