Strategy Meeting at Competition

Overview

Alliance Selection is one of the most important parts of a competition; it defines if you win or lose. So how do we prepare for this time-sensitive part of the competition? We have a Strategy Meeting. This is about an hour long meeting where a group composed primarily of students look through teams at the competition to find good fits for our strategy.

Pick Lists

During the meeting, we assemble several “Pick Lists” that rank the teams that we’d choose as Alliance Captains or first picks.

First Pick List

This list is composed of teams, ranked in order of preference, that would work best with our own robot. At the end of qual matches, if we are ranked as the first alliance captain, we will often talk to the team at the top of our list before alliance selection starts in order to get a head start on combining scouting data as well as thinking about our second pick.

Second Pick List

Compared to the first pick list, the second pick list tends to be far more variable. Often, this means the list is a lot longer than the first pick. Teams on the second pick list tend to be picked by lower alliance captains (assuming you are a higher level captain or first pick) so to be prepared for this eventuality, lists should be at least 8 teams, with 12-16 being optimal.

No Pick List

This list is composed of teams that don’t fit with our strategy. Often, this list can include several of the top teams at the event. The point of this list is to allow us to filter through teams and be able to say “I don’t think they’d improve our performance.” The most common reasons teams find their ways on this list include (but are not limited to): Non-GP behavior, unreliability in qualification matches, and overlapping skill sets with us and/or pick list archetypes.