Pre-Match Strategy Sessions

[Chris Fultz]

This issue seemed especially true at the Championships this year, so I would like to offer a short learning lesson for some teams.

When you are talking in your alliance, you do no one in the group any good to overstate your capabilities. You could actually cause the alliance to set a bad strategy into play if you are not able to perform as you say.

A specific example from one match this year:
(I won't use team names because a: it wouldn't be nice and b: I don't remember).

We were debating what autonomous modes to run. Our partner said they could score on the middle row, we scored on the bottom. If it worked, it could be cool to both score. If not, we could have a collision and both miss.

When I asked how accurate they were, I was told "we hit allmost every one". This was their 7th match, and the scouting data I had in my book did not support that claim. There was time before the match, so I signaled up to our scouting team to get an update. I found the team had scored 1 keeper total in 6 matches, not quite "hitting almost every one".

I nicely just suggested that we run our autonomous as the lowest risk plan and did not mention the scouting data that I had.

So what is my point? By overstating their capability, we were close to putting together a plan that could have caused us to miss the keeper completely, and maybe damaged our robots in a crash. Not a good plan.

So, you are way better off to state your actual, demonstrated capability, so your alliance can put together a realistic strategy to play. If you overstate what you can do, it can backfire on you when you cannot perform - and teams remember that.