Day 7: Second Day of Competition

As we predicted yesterday, it was a nerve-wracking day. We arrived at 8:00 at the Convention Centre, a nice long sleep in☺. We continued our good form at the start of the day by winning our first two games easily (we had to score in our own goal to try and increase our Scoring Points; as winning by a large margin means you get less scoring points, which are important for rankings). This meant that we were still on the top of the table in our division after 4 games, although it was only by 1 point.
Our next game was against a strong alliance consisting of Free Range Robotics (who we had won the Nationals in an alliance with), and another strong US robot. We had worked out a strategy to defeat our opponents, however, we had a Vex Net problem and as a result our autonomous failed and our robot stopped working halfway through the game, before restarting later on. Due to these problems we were unable to keep up with the amount of balls scored by the other team and we lost the match. That loss dropped us to 21st in the rankings. While fixing the problem (a known mechanical problem which no one told us about!), Matthew came across a broken intake motor, by fixing this our robot is now performing better than ever.
Our next game was against two good robots, and our allied partner had just finished rebuilding their robot and were unable to score any points. Despite this, we persevered and managed to keep the score relatively close. The introduction of the white balls evened up the scores to the point where the winner was unclear. After an unbearable 2 minutes, the score appeared on the screen, MAGS-71, Opponents-70. The close margin pushed us to 8th in the rankings.
Our last game was against Glenfield (GCEC) who was paired with another good robot. Whilst we performed well, our alliance was not as strong as theirs. Many people complimented our robot and its continued excellent performance even though we lost. We are now ranked 9th on the leader board out of 98 in our division.
After the seeding matches had finished for the day the new game 'Round Up' was released. Check it out at vexrobotics.com; it looks a very interesting and different to any other previous game.
We then left for the rodeo where we watched bull riding, barrel racing and calf tying. It was an awesome experience, with seats as close to the arena as possible. Going to a rodeo is recommended for anyone visiting Texas and Fort Worth was every bit 'country and western', just fabulous.
Tomorrow we have one more game before alliance selection for the finals in our division. The top six of these 24 teams go on to compete with 18 other teams for the title of 'World Champions'.
It’s been an extremely tiring day and we have an even busier day ahead of us. Goodnight.
The Roarbotix Team in the USA