I was waiting for the match video to appear on TBA to give them a shout out, but that really stood out watching live. Even more impressive when you consider that was the first match they appeared in that day.
Their last second driving on 1533’s forks were equally impressive. Took me a few matches of thinking “what is 2655 doing?! Go climb!” before I stopped freaking out.
If you want to see some amazing defense I recommend checking out 4499 in the Houston Einstein Round Robin Matches.
They effectively block the shortest path from the opponents portal to the opponents side of the scale. They trap opponent scale bots running to the portal and and never take any pinning or null zone fowls.
4499’s amazing defense was key to us(2910) and 4911 keeping ahead of some of the best scale bots in the world.
1817’s defense was crucial for the seventh alliance for playoffs on Galileo. They helped limit the scale abilities of each alliance we faced, and we would not have been able to advance as far as we did without their strong gameplay.
Team 980 had another robot with great defensive capability this year thanks to our powerful drivetrain and robust design. At the Los Angeles Regional, we had a match against 5818 (the number #1 seed at the time and finalists with us). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUCqxnOivdw at around the 1:20 mark in this match, 5818 came over to our side to grab cubes from our switch, so we followed behind them and kept them on our side for about a minute, shutting them down and winning us the match.
Thanks for the shout out! We had an amazing alliance and a great strategy. You and 4911 were an amazing scale pair.
Yep. This kind of driving was what bumped your team up our pick list. It was great to play with you.
Look at Carver on Einstein:
4499 was the primary defensive bot, but the key to that alliance winning was a combined effort. Every robot contributed constantly, that is the reason they beat world class alliances.
4499 stops the blue alliance bot for 40 seconds. Start at 1:20 to see them set up their defense. 4911 also pesters the robot trying to fill the switch.
4499 absolutely shuts down 1323’s scoring capability. 1323 scores a few cubes, but their speed was way slower leaving most of the scale work to 3476. 1323 had no uncontested scores during the match. Also watch midway through that 4911 is about to grab a cube, but they see an opportunity to trap 1323, they immediately back up and pin them making them drive the long way around. This also speaks to playing from a slight lead so you can afford to play defense the whole match.
The whole alliance pesters 1319 the whole match. Also note that as Red feels they may lose their switch, all three robots come back to maintain control.
I think the best defense is being situational. Being able to slow down the other alliance just a little bit makes a big difference in the long run.
At the Minnesota North Star Regional 2491 had a good defense strategy, they body blocked bots who come on their side. They prevented bots from scoring on their switch and parked between the switch and wall, so they couldn’t get out.
Here’s an example. Timestamp at roughly 1:36 http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2018mnmi2_qf1m1
hope this helps
At the ventura regional our collector broke so we defaulted to defense against 968. This was also possibly the last and final match our drive base driver would ever play since he graduates this year, so he went hard on the defense. Solid and well played match by all teams though.
We(5484) did pretty good in this match if I do say so myself.
1817 has such a great driver, and is amazing at defense. Here is an example of the damage they can do (to your score and your intake 
)
As 1319’s driver, for the life of me I can’t remember playing in this match. 1619, however, responded very well to the defense.
1817 has gotten so good at defense over the last few years that I don’t understand why they bothered putting an intake on their robot this year. Seriously, next year I expect them to build a 120 pound platform that spends the entire match running into other robots.
Not only did we spend the time to put an intake on the robot, but we also included the ability to play scale (even if we never finished putting it on our robot. We only allocated about 30 pounds for all of that, the rest of the weight was in our drivebase. We decided to put an intake on our bot so that we could play defensive switch as well as the ability to get the RP from auto and the scale ability more to allow for us to climb.
Becareful what you wish for
This was our first and only playing defense in for power up thought I put it up it’s really your opinion if it’s great. We decided to play defense primarily on the switch wall because we knew we were going to have a really tough time with a great robot 3005. They were able to push us into the null zone once but that was primarily my fault for not staying side ways. Btw Probably nothing like 1817
https://youtu.be/CT2jGODp-qc
Really appreciate the mention here.
For reference since the match videos are up and I am reviewing.
This is one where we focused on defense:
I think that 6377 did really well against 1619, basically shutting them down.