Poor alliance distributions

Did anyone else feel that the alliances were not set up very well at the buckeye regional? My team ( 211 ) was paired up with rookie or second year team in 5 of our 7 matches. We played against older teams in all 7 matches. I know you can’t always judge a team by its age, but on average, older teams are more reliable. I also know of other Rochester teams that were screwed up. Some teams had the same partner 3 times out of the 7 matches.

I don’t mean to sound like a whiner because we finished very poorly. We did not have the best robot ( our drivetrain kept dying ) but we should have done better. Our last 3 partners didn’t even move, but we still won one of them and came real close in another one.

Congratulations to our neighbors, the sparkx ( 1126 ), for winning it all and the x-cats ( 191 ) for doing such a good job. Of all the robots I saw ( I am our coach so I didn’t see all of them ) the bausch & lomb ( team 73 ) was the most impressive. It was the only robot I saw that could really stack. Great job and good luck at nationals.

*Originally posted by MasterZeus *
**Did anyone else feel that the alliances were not set up very well at the buckeye regional? My team ( 211 ) was paired up with rookie or second year team in 5 of our 7 matches. We played against older teams in all 7 matches. I know you can’t always judge a team by its age, but on average, older teams are more reliable. I also know of other Rochester teams that were screwed up. Some teams had the same partner 3 times out of the 7 matches.

I don’t mean to sound like a whiner because we finished very poorly. We did not have the best robot ( our drivetrain kept dying ) but we should have done better. Our last 3 partners didn’t even move, but we still won one of them and came real close in another one.

Congratulations to our neighbors, the sparkx ( 1126 ), for winning it all and the x-cats ( 191 ) for doing such a good job. Of all the robots I saw ( I am our coach so I didn’t see all of them ) the bausch & lomb ( team 73 ) was the most impressive. It was the only robot I saw that could really stack. Great job and good luck at nationals. **

It was weird but you have to make do with what you got to work with.
You were giving us quite a headache.
Better luck awaits you guys down in Houston I am sure.

Thanks for the encouragement. Hope to see you guys in Houston too.

Our team 769 was 17th coming into our last match and we were partnered with the lowest number team, and they were in last place, and unrealiable. Becasue they didn’t get to the top of the hill with us, we got off to prevent more points for the other alliance ( which was a questionable move by our driver/leader ) and we lost 36-5 and plummeted to 31st. After doing a few calculations, if they could simply get to the top, our alliance would have won 55-36 giving us 127, putting us near or in the top 10. So just becasue a team is experienced doesn’t mean they are more realiable than a less experienced team. My team beat numbers like 223 twice, 337, even 384. We lost with teams 395, 122 (though we should have won this match) and 116.

There’s a discussion about possible remedies here:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19012

Our team for instance had an issue with our allliance partners for instance because the alliance pairing was not random. We were not allianced with a wide variety of teams therefore in the final rounds we were allianced/against with virutally none of the top 8 alliances. This made our chances at getting picked in the final rounds slim because the teams in the finals had not seen us in action. We were ranked as a team 13th and were fairly effective in all of our matches winning 6 out of 7, but yet were not picked for the finals, we believe because of this reason.

Team 141

*Originally posted by Jeff Waegelin *
**There’s a discussion about possible remedies here:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19012 **

Lets continue this over there … to keep it all in one place.