What happened in Curie???

[Shankar M]

These posts often pop up at the end of events, but the answers to the questions never really change. Randomised ranking is part of the FIRST qualification system and it is something that every single team has to deal with.

While it is indeed unfortunate, and often frustrating, to get paired with robots that, are in your view, weak or, worse yet, don't show up (particularly this year), good teams are always able to find ways to win. This weekend, some of FIRST's best teams found ways to seed extremely well (111 and 1114, for example, went undefeated). If you look over their schedules, I'm sure you will find not easy matches; these teams worked extremely hard with what they had and they came out on top.

As for Curie specifically, defense dominated the qualification rounds as teams learned very early that the best way to stop some of the talented scorers in the division was to play a very tough shut down game. This type of strategy saw numerous powerful scorers stymied and left many of them with losses.

We all know that rankings do not really reflect robot performance. Scouting is the only way to discern how well a robot is accomplishing various tasks that your team desires from an alliance partner. I am sure that the teams that seeded in the top 8 were aware of this and chose to select the numerous talented teams that seeded not just outside the top 8, but the top 28 (254 at 34, 1771 at 36, 68 at 51 just to name a few). With such talent available outside the top 28, compared to the robots that ranked from 10 to 28, it is not surprising at all that the alliances ended up as they did.