Written by Fiona Hanlon, FIRST Robotics Competition Team Experience Specialist
It is with great joy that I am able to share this news with our community. We are excited to announce that we will be implementing the Double Elimination Playoff Model at all official FIRST ® Robotics Competition Events for the 2023 season. This includes the division playoffs and the Einstein tournament at FIRST ® Championship. As with many things we try in FIRST Robotics Competition, this is a pilot. We will be soliciting feedback from teams, volunteers, and Program Delivery Partners after events to understand how this went and what (if any) changes should be made. Please help us by sharing your feedback in the surveys that are sent from FIRST.
I want to take a moment to thank all the volunteers who helped us with this project. For those who may not know, we formed a working group to help determine a solution to the challenges timeouts introduced at events and opened this up to look at the entire playoff model. A few months ago, we announced the outcome of that working group but noted it was dependent on being able to complete the work to implement this change prior to the start of the 2023 events. We again turned to our community and have been working closely with this volunteer group the past couple of months.
Since we shared preliminary information about the model, we have made a few changes and updates to share with the community now. We swapped matches 3 & 4 and 11 & 12 based on feedback from the community to improve the time available to all teams. Additionally, the initial schedule included breaks but did not specify what content would be shown during them. We have created a plan for various content to fill the time, including presenting most of the awards during some of the breaks at many of our events. The 2023 FIRST Robotics Competition game manual will have the complete tournament ruleset including updated graphics.
Thank you again to everyone who helped provide feedback and a huge thank you to our volunteers for helping us make this a reality!
Big time W. Awesome to see this is comfirmed! Presenting awards between playoff matches is going to be such a huge improvement. I can’t wait to see how this plays out!
Huge thanks to the community members that were involved in creating and implementing this new format.
I like the second bracket and breaks during the middle, but I don’t think I like only playing one match against the same alliance. It’s always fun to tweak your match strategy up against them, but you can only do that in the finals.
What I like most about this is that they saw feedback and took it seriously. Changing match orders, adding a plan for filler time, all great things.
I notice there’s no mentioned changes about the potential for video review on serious referee calls including red/yellow cards. Hopefully that will be discussed in a later update.
I too can barely hold my breakfast in due to all the excitement. This is great news, I’m super stoked for DE in playoffs this year, as well as awards between matches!
Really curious to see what the alternative is then for division DCMP’s. For example, FiM has four divisions that are going to advance, how does that work with double elim? Do they keep the same format?
So, not a strict double-elimination. If you’re Alliance 1, and beat Alliance 8, then Alliance 4, then Alliance 2, and go up into the finals against the winner of the losers bracket, but LOSE there, you don’t get a second chance.
(In a typical double-elimination, nobody is knocked out unless they lose twice.)
There’s a limited amount of time at any event. This adds 7 play-off matches. That will mean either (a) fewer qualification matches, or (b) shorter awards ceremony.
Finals are best 2 of 3, says so right on the graphic
Which i guess also mean’s it’s not strict double elimination, as someone from the bottom bracket can lose once in the finals and still have another match.
Have they talked about how district points will be awarded with the double elimination tournament? That will make a BIG difference on qualification to district championships.
that is all