Easiest ways to succeed at competition

[jijiglobe]

I've been wanting to create this thread for a while to discuss the simplest things that teams can do to improve their results at competition, these can be based off of personal experience with your own team, observations of other teams, things you've read on CD, or anything else. I'll start with my 3 tips.

1) Make sure everyone on your team showers every night, and wears deoderant

This is probably the easiest of the three. Having a team member who smells bad reflects badly on you and makes you unpleasant to work with. Teams will be unlikely to want to work with you again

2) Make your bumpers slick, and clearly legible from the top of the stands

This makes you easier to scout and collect data on. Most alliance captains would rather pick a robot that they know is bad, than a robot that they don't have data on. Good looking bumpers also reflect well on the quality of your robot. If a team can't build bumpers that stay in one piece, it's hard to trust their robot to stay in one piece.

3) Stay professional and polite at all times

This one comes from a personal experience that I had at a competition in 2015. One of our alliance partners in Quals dropped a stack during a match and, instead of adapting to the situation and dealing with it, the drive team got into a shouting match. This was an isolated incident of a robot that we had been planning to pick as our second pick, however, because of this incident, we decided to pick another team, and they didn't get to play in elims. You never know who will be listening to the arguments between you and your teammates, so it's best to avoid having them.

What are everyone else's competition tips?

[c.shu]

1. Read the rule book and know what you can do, when you can do it, and where you can go.

2. Be proactive about match strategy, don't try to do it all in the queuing line. See if you can get your partners in the upcoming match to discuss strategy with you beforehand so it is not rushed and you make sure you go into each match with the best chances.

3. Focus on how all three robots on your alliance in qualifications can complement each other to best win the match. If this means you are not playing the role you would like to be playing every match, so be it. Wins over ego.

4. Be honest about your capabilities and don't bite off more than you can chew. If a mechanism isn't working let your partners know. Find something you are good at and can do consistently, not only will you be more attractive to those picking alliances, you may win more qualifications because of it.

5. If you are an alliance captain for eliminations make sure you don't just pick teams based on recognizable names or personal preferences. Back it up with data and try to build the alliance that best suits your strategy for winning. Back in 2014 team 254 chose a team who was ranked 43/45 as their first pick for the first alliance and won their regional. (Central Valley-2014)

[Cal578]

Originally Posted by c.shu

1. Read the rule book and know what you can do, when you can do it, and where you can go.
...

(emphasis mine)
++1 this. Everyone on the team, and particularly the drive team and those working in the pit, should be very familiar with rules. Robot rules, Game rules, Tournament rules. Following rules helps you win and/or be picked; penalties have the opposite effect.

My addition: be Gracious and Professional. To everyone, all the time. There are different measurements of "succeed"; GP will help with all of them.

[CJ_Elliott]

The best thing to do is be reasonable. Know your boundaries and build to them every year trying to push the envelope. Knowing what you can and can't do could be the difference between winning a match and not, getting picked and not. One of the things I see teams do every year is try to be something that they aren't.

[asid61]

Drive practice trumps robot attachments. Consistently doing one minor thing is far better than trying and failing major things, both in seeding and being picked.
The higher seed alliances (5-8) look for inconsistent potential, lower seeds look for consistent performance.

[SciBorg Dave]

Be yourself and be honest. Good judges and teams know B.S.

[ctt956]

Originally Posted by asid61

Drive practice trumps robot attachments. Consistently doing one minor thing is far better than trying and failing major things, both in seeding and being picked.
The higher seed alliances (5-8) look for inconsistent potential, lower seeds look for consistent performance.

Drivers should be driving during build season. If not a robot, any R/C vehicles would help. Even certain video games are good practice. I like The Cheesy Poofs' driver selection process, and they always seem to do well.

[CaityDawh]

I believe one of the easiest ways to succeed at competition is to scout. Even if your team don't have 6 scouts, a few dedicated students can take notes on the different teams they see compete. Those notes are often invaluable.

Scouting doesn't just have to be for creating a pick list. The data collected while scouting can help teams to know what strategies can be effective in certain matches. It's always better to go into a match strategy meeting knowing what you're talking about, and being backed with data, than just going in blind.

Good scouting and good strategy can turn an iffy, or okay robot into a #1 seed, or even the Regional/District winner.

And of course always scout your own robot. It's easy to get stuck in the mind frame of "this what we wanted to do," and not, "this is what we can do." If you scout your own team, you will get hard data that you can not argue with. You will get a sense of what your robot can actually do.

[Lij2015]

Originally Posted by c.shu

5. If you are an alliance captain for eliminations make sure you don't just pick teams based on recognizable names or personal preferences. Back it up with data and try to build the alliance that best suits your strategy for winning. Back in 2014 team 254 chose a team who was ranked 43/45 as their first pick for the first alliance and won their regional. (Central Valley-2014)

To be fair that 43/45 team was 973, the team they won a championship with in 2011.

[Harman341]

#1 sleep

When you don't sleep, your ideas are incoherent, you're more stressed out, you're less willing to solve problems, and you're probably going to get sick. Being tired hurts EVERYTHING you do.

#2 Don't change your robot

The build season is only six weeks long, so once you unbag your robot at your first competition, there really isn't much you can change. That 15 pound intake that you wish you could remake, well you just can't do it. It's not like over the course of four competitions you could replace your top functions twice over. If you don't change your robot, it will not be surpassed by the other robots that are also not being altered.

[Ninjastahr]

Originally Posted by Harman341

#2 Don't change your robot

The build season is only six weeks long, so once you unbag your robot at your first competition, there really isn't much you can change. That 15 pound intake that you wish you could remake, well you just can't do it.

Challenge accepted.

Originally Posted by Harman341

It's not like over the course of four competitions you could replace your top functions twice over. If you don't change your robot, it will not be surpassed by the other robots that are also not being altered.

So, you mean making vision processing work and adding a climber between competitions is a bad idea?

But seriously, if your team has had trouble in the past with making practice matches or inspection, don't change your robot at competition! Last year, my team added a can grabber between Quals and Elims (or playoffs, or whatever they were last year) and it was definitely not worth the time and effort it took to do in time. If you're not 100% sure you can add it before practice matches, don't do it.

[NShep98]

Originally Posted by Ninjastahr

But seriously, if your team has had trouble in the past with making practice matches or inspection, don't change your robot at competition!

Would you consider removing our entire arm mechanism and taking it home mid-Saturday a significant change? I mean, we did prove nothing but a box on wheels can play this game.

In all seriousness, my contribution is to make friends. Lots of them. Being a new driver, my favorite match was the one where we got along best with our two other alliance partners. There was one scout from another team that I would see often and he would ask how we were doing. Friends are great. Friendly people are great. Make friends.

[gblake]

Follow Mr Miyagi's advice and seek balance, not success.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by gblake

Follow Mr Miyagi's advice and seek balance, not success.

I thought that was only 2012?

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Ninjastahr

But seriously, if your team has had trouble in the past with making practice matches or inspection, don't change your robot at competition! Last year, my team added a can grabber between Quals and Elims (or playoffs, or whatever they were last year) and it was definitely not worth the time and effort it took to do in time. If you're not 100% sure you can add it before practice matches, don't do it.

I can definitely understand minor tweaks and fixes, but I would agree that making big changes at competition is stressful for all involved. If you have to do it because your robot just isn't functioning the way it needs to, that's one thing. If your robot is working and now you're being tempted to add that one more little feature, resist the urge. This is where things start to get crazy.

We didn't have our auto modes working properly when we started quals at GTRC. Students worked on it every spare minute they could outside of our matches. There were many opportunities that we could have deployed the very latest and hoped for the best. But we all decided, as a group, that since the drive team was doing well with what they had, we were not going to risk screwing up, crashing the software, or other "oops" mistakes by deploying code without first fully testing it on the practice field. Did we lose some potential auto points because of this? Yes, definitely. But the software students, the drive team students, and the mentors were all much more relaxed and less stressed, knowing that "it'll be ready when it's ready".