Car Nack Predicts 2011-1

[nuggetsyl]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

'07 was a rather lot easier than '11, though. Here's the rundown of what makes hanging lots harder this year:

1. You have to hang 12 tubes for this challenge, not 10.
2. Most of your tubes are always 50 feet away, not 15.
3. Much less room for multiple robots to work the grid. It's pretty much 1 per half.
4. Lose just one of your tubes to the opponents and this is impossible till you steal the same tube back.
5. The more you succeed at this the harder it becomes as your vision gets blocked.
6. You have a shorter window to accomplish this. You HAVE to try the minibot race because a full rack is only 20-30 more than 1st and 2nd place. An 8th ringer completely dominated ramping.

I'd actually really like to expand on the last point because it's what makes this such an incredibly easy prediction for Car-Nack. It's a pretty simple game theory analysis. There's extremely little incentive for actually completing all 6 logos. Specifically, there's almost no incentive for finishing a bottom row. Allow me to explain. Lets assume that your alliance would take the whole match to finish the grid, averaging 20 seconds per row. There's 2 options, spend the last 20 seconds finishing the last bottom row, or spend it lining up for the minibot race. The choice here is obvious. A completed bottom row is only worth 6 points. The two slowest minibots on the field still add up to 25 points. It's not even really a contest, you HAVE to play the minibot race. So teams are only going to spend about 100 seconds trying to fill the grid, which makes it even more impossible.

This is markedly different from '07. Two ramped bots were worth 50 points, which is a dominant endgame strategy up until you're hanging your 7th ringer in a row. If you had to choose between hanging a 7th or 8th ringer, or ramping, you're spending those last 20 seconds hanging. That's just not the case this year.

I am not saying this will be common if i had to put a number on it i would say less then 5 times will you see the 6 first logos. But never i do no think so. Of coarse i am not CarNack so take it with a grain of salt