Question about small event alliance selection?

FIRST General Forum
1

Let’s suppose there was a 24 team event, all teams have functioning robots and none drop out. During alliance selection things go normal with 1st to 8th alliance picking their first picks. For the second pick, alliance #2 picks out of the 2 teams remaining. They select team A however team A declines so they pick team B. Does alliance #1 get to pick team A as they are the only team left?

Would alliance selection restart with 7 alliances?

Or would team A become a backup and immediately join alliance #1

2

I believe that because of the rules alliance 1 would only have 2 robots, however I’ve never seen an official event with only 24 teams.

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3

This year PNW West Valley had 24 teams and was run with 7 alliances to avoid this situation. The #1 alliance was given a bye in quarterfinals.

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4

Carleton was set to have 24 teams this year.

5

According to Kevin Ross (one of the founders of FIRSTWA), this exact situation was brought up by students on his team, which prompted asking FIRST, which led to the above ruling.

If events had continued, we were told that this setup would become the official way this would be handled. I wonder if it will pop up in the next game manual…

6

Well I was thinking with current ruling Team A would become a backup player and automatically get into the 2 team alliance.

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7

A team that declines an invite cannot accept being on the backup list.

8

This was a real situation at the 2020 PNW West Valley District Event this year, and this thread should answer your question: 2020 PNW West Valley District Event will only have 7 alliances in playoffs

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9

Not sure if this would be “legal” for official events, but I have seen off-season events with 24 teams where unless you are already in an alliance captain position, declines are not allowed. Before alliance selection started, the organizers would check with all the teams to see if anyone was in a position where they could not compete (broken robot) and if there were teams that could not compete, they were prepared to go into a 7 team alliance selection.

10

Robot Rewind (offseason) doesn’t have many teams so they run with 4 alliances, skipping to semifinals. TBA doesn’t have any info on how many teams were there, but IIRC, there were over 20.

11

As small as 12 (2017 iirc) and as large as 23 (2018 or 2019)

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12

At NTX 2017, only 24 robots opted to play in elims (out of 25 attending the event), and alliance selection was still run with 8 alliances. Granted, there was no captain inter-picking allowed either which probably allowed this to run more smoothly.

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