"Random" Match List Generation

[Brian C]

Originally Posted by Rich Wong

There is one on on the volunteer staff to be blame. Please don't make statements that are not true.
The system automatically generated the list. I do not believe anyone on the NYC staff had anything to do with creating the match assignments.

Rich,

I don't believe mtaman02 was attempting to place blame on anyone. I noticed the smile after his statement and it appears to be an "inside joke".

From what I have read this is a very touchy subject to many folks in FIRST. My personal observations are that at the SBPLI regional which had 39 teams the match pairing were very odd. We noticed many teams (ourselves included) which were paired up with the same team 3 or 4 times during the seeding matches. While we did play 12 matches I would have settled for 11 if the parings could be better distributed. One of the interesting things that occurred was that the Friday seeding rounds were ended early because the organizers noticed that there were 2 teams that would have had back-to-back matches. To avoid this they ended the day a few matches early in between what would have been their "no turnaround" pairings and then had their next match as the first one up on Sat morning.

We also attended the Hartford regional 2 weeks earlier to scout some teams and renew old friendships. After looking over the match schedule there it seemed to follow the "normal" layout from the past where teams would be with a certain partner one match and then be against them at some point later in the tournament.

As far as the Hatch Technologies seeding software and the tournament/pairing generation it creates: I have my own opinions on the software but I would rather not post them in a public forum as I don't want to get off topic or create ill feelings.

One other observation; there are many post season competitions which have the same amount of teams in attendance that are present at many regionals. Many of these competitions have no problems whatsoever with pairings, scoring or field glitches. Some of them have generated their own software to insure they have complete control over the end product. A good example of this is BattleCry@WPI.