Best Stragtey

[writchie]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I think this clearly shows, as any FIRST vet will tell you, rankings are not what's important (especially in an event that runs less than 11 or 12 matches).
Last year's Championship winning alliance was constructed of teams ranked 1st (1114), 12th (217), and 57th (148) out of 86. An average ranking of more than 23. In 2007 the Championship winning alliance was ranked 9th (190), 37th (987), and 50th (177), or an average rank of 32nd.
Even in Lunacy this still applies. Look at the Cass Tech event, which ran 12 qualification matches. 469 started out 1-7, finished 5-7, and ranked 27th out of 40. Yet 469 was selected 2nd and reached the finals.

Seeding doesn't equate directly to robot quality.
While I'll agree some captains were unprepared, as they always are, most of them did a fine job in picking out who was ranked higher and lower than they should have been.

I do agree with most of what you say. Sure 9 matches doesn't invoke the law of large numbers but it is starting to get close. In selecting partners an alliance captain has objective measures and subjective measures. If an alliance captain selects higher seeded robots robots for subjective reasons and they end up doing a significant better job than their seed rank would indicate, then you would expect to see teams with higher average ranking beating teams with lower average seed rank, as indeed your examples might indicate. This is the indicator that the subjective measures are outperforming the objective ones. I haven't looked yet at the correlations for past events or other regionals. However, at 2009 Florida, none of the selections of higher ranked seeds resulted in a win with one exception. The top seed 1144 lost in the QF. But another poster has mentioned that 1144's pick was an accidental error. So we can't really attribute their opponent, with a higher average rank, to winning due to it's picks of robots seeded 29th and 36th (of 52).

As for last year championship, An average seed of 23 out of 86 is pretty much the same average seed as 12.7 out of 52. Most games need both performance and balance. The theoretical best picks on seeding alone may not be balanced. So achieving balance often means picks that pull up the average seed.

Nationals are a little bit different situation and so too are regionals with lots of teams on their second or third competition.

My points were really three. 1)Teams with a chance to be ranked 12th or better should be prepared to pick their Alliance partners, 2) you don't need to worry about picking teams that are lower seeds than you - you won't ever pick them - they pick you. 3) you should have a good reason for picking higher seeds over significantly lower seeds.