What is the competition structure at the St. Louis Championship?
Is it like the regional?
It’s like four regional competitions (Archimedes, Curie, Newton, Galileo) at one venue. The champion alliances of each field go to the Einstein field.
/thread
N1
This is where you get the “divisions”
arc - Archimedes Division
cur - Curie Division
gal - Galileo Division
new Newton Division
The actually championship takes place on:
ein - Einstein Field
Depending on the regional’s you used to, the championship is like 6-8 regionals divided into 4 divisions.
Last year each division had 88 teams. In comparison the largest regionals this year had 66, most somewhere around 45. That’s a lot of teams.
Now if you add the 200 other FTC, FLL, and jrFLL teams then you might get an idea for the true size of the FIRST Championship.
The dome is big enough to hold 5 FRC, 4 FTC, 8 FLL fields, and all the spare field equipment with room to spare. The adjacent convention center can hold the same but with 550-10’x10’ team pits, sponsor display area’s, and FIRST information booths, with a little room to spare.
In short, the championship is huge.
And according to a recent post on Bill’s blog, there could potentially be 400 FRC teams this year, meaning 100 on each field. It seems like it would be overwhelming and really stretch event time contraints.
It seems that they will reduce amount of matches played by each team so match time doesn’t become too much of an issue. According to someone’s calculations at the max there could be 411 teams. 345 are currently registered + 36 from the week 6 regionals + 18 from FiM + 12 from MAR.
They still plan to get every team 9+ matches in their division. Most of the regionals I’ve heard of have been able to pull off 6-7 minute match turnarounds(start of match 1 to start of match 2), with a couple being closer to 5 minute turnaround. This should make it possible to have 100 teams on each division.
100(teams/division) * 9(matches/team) / 6(teams/match) = 150(matches/division) * 6(minutes/match) / 60(minutes/hour) = 15 hours/division
Looking at the posted schedule, we have:
5 hours Thursday(1pm-6pm)
7.5 hours Friday(9:30am-12pm, 1pm-6pm)
2.25 hours Saturday(8:15am-10:30am)
This totals 14.75 hours.
Yes, it might be a little stretch, but this game allows it. Considering every team competing has already been at 1 event so far, I suspect they could fairly easy pull off at least 6 minute matches, sans some catastrophic failure.
TL;DR - it’s possible, for this year. I can’t say anything about next year though.