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It should be, there wasn't much change in the rules since last year so my guess would be that it will be, however they had tape on the edges last year, which things may get caught on.

hey guys i read through this entire thread and even on the first post there's a mention of bots being "taped to the floor"?? im not exactly sure what this means, since i'm obviously (and stupidly) thinking of it way too literally. can anyone explain?

What I mean at least is that a lot of judges that run the event place some tape, such as electrical tape, along the perimeter of the field. This causes problems because sometimes the opposing bot will get stuck on it as you push them out, and if you are unable to continue pushing them out then even though you clearly were the better bot they will call it a tie and the lighter one wins.

As for taping it to the floor, it violates a few rules such as the bot needs to be offensive, if it was taped to the floor it can't go anywhere and is thus a defensive bot. It also would probably leave some sort of residue on the floor which is also illegal.


As a side note, my regionals has had a different approach to the SumoBots in that there are three fights in one round, so thus best two out of three wins the match. That way if something stupid happened you could fix it to prove you are the better bot, plus its a real crowd pleaser.

I'm guessing there are not a lot of Bots in your region. I don't think we would have time to do that, even if we ran all day.

We only had 12 teams compete, but still, the same idea could be applied to the state competition as there are only like 9 teams in a slot, and not every round requires all the time and some schools won't show. But who knows, probably won't happen.

Most matches don't require the full two minutes, but you can't design a competition on the assumption that most of your matches will be short - what if they aren't? On a single court you need 13 matches to reduce eight teams to two, one undefeated team and one team with one loss. With two minutes between and two minutes per match, you can do that in fifty two minutes. Even if you ran your three matches one right after the other, then you would need to allot eight minutes per match and could only count on six or seven matches per hour, which is only enough for a five-draw.

But remember that at states they have two matches going at the same time, which would significantly reduce the time.

I'm confused - the rules specifically state that the competition will be a double elimination tournament. If you have a competition set up for best of three is the winner, then there are only two ways I can see that as working while following the rules:

1. Two teams meet for a best of three bout. One team moves on and one team is eliminated (one of the two teams has to lose twice if both teams face each other three times). If that's what they did, then you've exaggerated the problem we had the first year when teams complained that if they lost twice to the same team (and that team went on to win the tournament) how could we know that they weren't the second best team in the competition - after all, the only team that beat them was the eventual first place team.

2. The other possible method I can see is that the three bouts count as one - whoever wins twice is credited with one victory and whoever loses twice is credited with one loss. That could never work at States - while its true that we use two rings and that we usually have between 10 and 20 minutes left in the hour (depending on how many bouts go to the full 2 minutes), the scenario described above would triple the number of bouts required. Taking the fastest possible finish we've had for a group during the two years this has been held at the State competition (40 minutes), using this method would require 120 minutes - one hour too long.

If it was run in a manner other than the two I've described, I'd like to know how it was done, while still following the rules that require this event to be held as a double-elimination tournament.

I was assuming he meant the latter, your option two - each match consists of three round, and you need to lose two matches to be eliminated. Is that right, Sheo?

Yes Option Two