Up to this point, we’ve had a very successful season in VRC. But you always want to finish things off with a strong finish in your state tournament. With that in mind, we had our robot tuned up and our autons ready for this one.
Qualification Domination
Our first two matches went about as well as you could possibly hope. We won autonomous, got the AWP, and the win in both matches. So we were off and running with 6 win points in the first two matches.
It was our third match when things started to get interesting. Our alliance partner didn’t have enough time between matches to roll up their end game so they didn’t even make it to the field.
(Seriously, they had three matches between their last match and this one; it wasn’t their fault. We’ve seen that happen quite a bit this year which is disappointing.)
Even going 2 vs. 1 in this match we still felt confident that we could win. Early in the match we did well and put ourselves in a perfect position to pull off the upset. But at the beginning of end game we snapped a chain and weren’t able to spin any rollers.
We weren’t able to overcome losing all the rollers so we ended up losing this one 133-166. Lesson learned – redundancy is good. ? In the future, we’ll make sure we add a second chain.
Getting a loss this early was disappointing. But our auto win points still had us at the top of the rankings.
Our next three matches were pretty straightforward – we got three solid wins and another auto win point. That moved us to 5-1 with 3 AWPs and put us at the top of the rankings.
Securing the Top Seed
Having a great record so far in the tournament had us feeling good, but we still had a big test in front of us. We were going to face one of the best bots in the tournament in two of our last three matches.
We started off partnering with 52739A Granbury 1 against 106A Brain Deads and 13113C Goblin Gang. 106A was one of only a couple teams left that could still beat us for the #1 ranking so we definitely wanted to win this one.
This match was a little bizarre. About 30 seconds into the match our alliance partner’s end game came out. That had us facing a tough 2 vs 1 for the rest of the match.
Then just a few seconds later our opponent’s end game came out early too! So in the end it came down to a really fun one on one match against 106A.
We finished with more disks in the high goal and we won on rollers. We’re not sure who won end game but the final score was 161-139 – which was all that mattered to us.
Our 8th match had us allied with another strong bot and it went pretty much as we expected. That left us with one last showdown against 106A.
At this point we were at the top of the rankings by a pretty wide margin. We knew we would be the #1 seed in alliance selection unless something went spectacularly wrong. Even so, we wanted to take care of business and not leave anything up the chance.
Unfortunately, this match was very anticlimactic. A few seconds after we got started 106A accidentally shot off their end game. Right after that their alliance partner got stuck.
That left us with a 2 vs 0 which we obviously were able to win… and we got another one of those sweet, sweet auto win points.
We finished qualifying with an 8-1 record and 21 win points. That earned us the top seed by 6 win points!
A big reason why we had such a wide margin in the rankings is because Chase’s autons were incredible all day long. We got a couple of win points using his solo AWP program and his right side program was consistently scoring between five and seven disks. It was fun to watch!
Hunting a State Championship
We were dominant in qualification. The only thing left to do was finish the day off by winning Tournament Champion. The #1 ranking gave us the opportunity to invite whoever we wanted to ally with us in the brackets and we used it to pick 87867G Landau Eagle.
Landau Eagle has a good left side auton, we have a good right side auton, and we fill the high goal well together. It was pretty solid fit.
We had a bye in the first round and were able to win our quarterfinal match pretty methodically by a score of 174-13. That moved us on to the semifinal.
In the semifinal we were matched up against 75442R Johnny 5 and 75442X X-Factor. The match started off well for us. We put five disks in the high goal during auton. That won us the auton bonus and gave us a decent lead heading into driver.
That’s when everything went haywire.
When the driver period began Johnny 5 started playing some heavy defense on us and ramming into us repeatedly. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue – we’ve dealt with aggressive defense before.
But ultimately, they ended up shoving a disk under our robot making it impossible for us to move so we weren’t able to score for the rest of the match.
Landau Eagle is a great team, so they should have been able to score enough on their own to help us get the win anyway. But their catapult was jammed so they weren’t able to score either.
At that point, we were powerless to do anything. We had to sit and watch our opponents score just enough points to take the match from us.
Obviously it’s devastating to be as dominant as we were all day and not come out with the win. But we did learn quite a few lessons and we will grow as a result of this. Chase is already working on a new design that will make it impossible for us to get stuck on a disk at Worlds.
Besides, we don’t have too much time to be disappointed – we have to get ready for our first combat robotics tournament in Longview, TX in a couple weeks!
