The 2023 championship only had 10 qualification matches. 10 just isn’t enough at an event like that (tons of teams, tons of randomness, poor ranking system) to sort out the luck factor.
Even worse, there are events with LESS than 10 qualification matches at their events.
Without writing a script or anything to see # of matches per event, I found 8 events with <10 matches per team in qualifications:
Lake Superior Regional
Northern Lights Regional
Ventura County Regional
Finger Lakes Regional
San Diego Regional
Festival de Robotique Regional
Minnesota 10,000 Lakes Regional
Silicon Valley Regional
How do we make it so:
No event has <10 qualification matches, and
Our culminating event, the championship, has a reasonable # of qualification matches (12 minimum seems pretty standard)
In the case of Regionals, the answer is more/smaller events. Adding events with a team limit of 50 teams instead of 60 teams would go a long way.
I fear the same answer is required for getting more Championship qual matches… but put me firmly in the camp of people who will happily take 2 fewer qual matches in exchange for having a single world championship event rather than 2 separate events.
FIRST has two forces pulling opposite directions for champs. # of teams at events and # of matches for those teams. The only other thing they could try to do is increase the # of divisions which seems to be about at the max end at 8 per event, yet they get massive community pushback for #2champs.
Point is the community is unlikely to be happy with anything FIRST HQ does, yet FIRST is there to maximize inspiration. We are a tough to please crowd.
Large Regionals are still on the same schedule as smaller events. So the only way to increase the number of matches is to have fewer teams, which without creating more events to account for less available slots will never happen.
As for champs, there have always been 10 matches (Or as long as I’ve been in FRC). I would rather have 10 matches with large divisions than many smaller divisions with 12 matches.
Match cycle time and length of breaks ought to be considered here. Depending on each year’s guidance from FIRST, there is some flexibility to run events faster or slower. More time has to be built in when a game is hard to score or reset quickly, or when the FMS is unreliable. Events with long distances between pits and fields have to take into account the worst-case turnaround time for teams with a bad match draw (or generate schedules that minimize such occurrences). Ideally, an event wouldn’t deviate too far from the published schedule, but the tighter an event controls punctuality, the less ability that event has to recover from a delay—and so the more buffer time has to be added.
So, maybe it would be beneficial to hear some feedback about the implications of adjusting those parameters?
DCMPs seem to have both large team counts and long distances to the fields, yet still get 12 matches in per team.
I think one of the bigger differences is that there are fewer practice matches and quals start sooner (thurs afternoon), which may not be as acceptable to regional teams compared to district teams, who already have 2 events under their belts.
Kevin,
spot on! How the heck did Ventura have only 9 matches for an event with 40+ teams?
We went to other events with similar numbers and played 12.
12 min should be the standard.
I agree all regionals are treated generally the same but district events run much more efficiently / faster than regionals.
I think the larger regionals can be more productive by incorporating some of what we do at districts by inspecting robots, flashing the radio, connecting to the field / calibration (if it’s ready), etc… Wednesday evening on load-in night. Then start practice matches right away Thursday morning and start qualifying matches during late afternoon to squeeze in 1-2 matches. Now, what will get sacrificed is filler line opportunity --at district events it’s not that big of a deal because we get two events for the price of a regional. But, one of the reasons we love going to a week 1 regional as a district team is to sit in filler line all day on Thursday and practice like crazy.
For champs, I’d love more matches but I don’t want more divisions or to split champs again. I’d rather have FIRST make a rule change like they did this year to at least help reduce the chance that teams can free-ride to an Alliance captain position because of an amazing schedule.
Or the flip slide where you get an unlucky tough match schedule. More matches in theory should minimize the difference in Strength of Schedule from the easiest to the worst. It would be nice to see Statbotics, EPAExpected Points Added, OPR or other metrics used going into Champs to factor into the algorithm in the match schedule.
That’s only true of the DCMPs that have divisions. Of the single-field DCMPs, CHS had 61 teams this year, FMA had 60, PNW had 54, and PCH had 51. Only Indiana had fewer than 40 (33).
All of them played 12 matches per team, but they were also all smaller than fields at the world championship.
This is obviously anecdotal, but I think having all-day Thursday to be inspected is pretty necessary since I always see a significant number of teams getting inspected right up until the end of the day (maybe 1 practice match). If matches started Thursday around 3-4, I feel like you’d end up with teams not having been inspected in time for their matches. I’ve never understood how you guys can manage it across all teams.
This of course is from the viewpoint of only ever been in the regional system often with 45-60+ team events. So maybe teams in California take their time getting inspected because they can.
How many inspectors do you typically have at a California event? I inspect at multiple district events and DCMP in FMA and I can count on one hand the events where all robots weren’t inspected prior to the start of the first match.
At DCMP this year (all teams have been inspected twice so most major issues have been caught already) 10 inspectors got through all 60 teams in about 3.5 hours. Everyone was done by 1:00 for the first match. 2017 we had a team not get the invite until the morning of the event and got there verynlate. They still made their first match.
At the 3 district qualifiers we had between 0 and 3 teams each that still needed to be inspected Saturday morning. More often than not it was a team that didn’t arrive until the morning as opposed to not having enough inspectors or inspections taking too long.
I used to feel this way before Texas went to districts. After the change in 2019, we haven’t had issues getting inspected Wednesday night within those 5 hours. You can also factor in the removal of the bag as well in helping with that.
I do think regionals could try to follow a schedule similar to district champs where you load in/start inspection Wednesday night. Thursday morning you continue inspection with practice matches starting about 2 hours before lunch. Then have Qual matches Thursday afternoon, all day Friday and finish up Saturday morning.
