I would like to thank FIRST and the community for the changes to the playoffs. We have ended the last several seasons on the 6th and 7th alliances. Always, 0-2 in the playoffs.
This year at MVR we ended up on the 8th alliance. The result???
Both the exact same AND completely different.
Under the old rules we would have played the 1st alliance twice… probably lost both times and be out of the playoff 0-2. (see above)
Under the new rules we played the 1st alliance twice and lost both times. However, we also had the opportunity to play other alliances (5, 6, 4) leaving the tournament with a 3-2 record in the playoffs.
Totally different experience for the students!
Thank you FIRST!
Thank you 1038 Lakota Robotics & 7165 Perkins Pirates!
Thank you to the MVR volunteers, staff & teams!
In my team’s week 2 event, we were 8th seed captains and were sent to lower bracket after a close match with 1st seed team. We probably would have been knocked out 0-2, but once we were in the lower bracket we beat the 5th, 4th, and 3rd seeds, before losing another close match to the 1st seed in the semifinals. The experience was so much better than a 0-2 loss would have been, and our alliance was so happy, and considered the results much more of a win than it otherwise would have been.
I’m very happy with double elims, since 8th alliance has the opportunity to win, or even finish as finalists as seen with the Magnolia regional.
Past years, your fate was pretty much sealed, right from alliance selections. But double elims really allows for a second chance, unlike a rubber match.
I enjoyed watching your alliance make an impressive return to the semifinals. It definitely kept the playoffs interesting and I was kept guessing who would make it to the final matches. Excellent work!
I’m also loving it. Our team got knocked down to the lower bracket on our first match, but we were able to play almost every other team, and crawl our way all the way up the lower bracket and win the finals! In the end, we ended up playing almost every alliance in the playoffs, and had a ton of fun! Huge thanks to our alliance partners, 2834, 7155, and especially our backup team, 5110, for helping us bring home a blue banner this weekend!
These are the kind of stories I love to read, I think playoff outcomes on the whole are so much more rewarding with the new Double Elimination format. Kudos to FIRST for pulling it off!
I love double elims. In 2022, 1672 made it to the semifinals in both our events for the first time ever, but got knocked out by the second alliance we matched up against in both. This year, at our first event, we won a match, lost a match, and then our alliance won two more matches with a backup before finally getting eliminated from the lower bracket. In total, our alliance got to see four different alliances in this format, which is super awesome in my opinion.
Also, we stayed in for longer, getting 3rd place. Our team didn’t just leave after losing in quarters/semis and got to stay for the finals matches before our buses got there and we went back to the pits to pack up. Wins all around!
This is great! There is a concrete (yet hypothetical) way this result is different. Under district points, it sounds like you would have earned 13 points for playoff performance, whereas under an old quarterfinal exit, you would have earned zero.
It’s a great way to measure performance of an alliance.
The top 4 alliances in the district playoffs always earn points so nothing new was changed this year, just the third place alliance gets a few more points than the fourth place alliance. They still add up to 20 points but they are not split 10 and 10 to each alliance anymore.
Pretty crazy through 84 events only the Utah regional has each alliance eliminated in descending order based on their number and even that event had an upset in the upper bracket, so no perfect bracket has come just yet. The top alliance is still winning most events but their is a good amount the other alliances making the finals. Cant imagine how it will be at the championship!
My only question to the format is: would it be better served as a true double elimination tournament where the lower bracket only has one loss remaining when they get to “finals” or leave it as a blank slate best of three? I don’t really have a strong feeling but it’s been a lively debate on our team.
Checking the winrate of the upper bracket winners in the finals sounds like a sick side project, I’ll update this thread if I happen to have time. The lower bracket winner is clearly a weaker team so IMO it doesn’t make a ton of a difference (I say this from experience being a lower bracket winner who lost 0-2 in finals).
While I see both sides of the argument, I feel that the two out of three for finals would be better. It means that the alliance from the lower bracket is not at an unfair disadvantage. It means that there is a lower likelihood of the finals being decided by a connection issue or the battery coming unplugged. The finalist form the upper bracket already has an advantage in that they’ve only had to play three matches compared to the five from the lower bracket finalist. This puts them on a more even footing for the finals.
This exactly. Double eliminations have potential to make so much difference in Districts where anything 4th and up will gain you points. The fact that any alliance can face off against any other means those final placements are more accurate and can be rewarded more fairly.