And the looser of the day is: My noodle-soup!
The poor thing had to stand in the cold for the whole day.

Each time I was about to consume it some important task, game, or… well – pizza hindered me on doing so.

Well, towards the evening I finally managed to lead the soup to her intended purpose, but my remorse will stay. RoboCup is a cruel sport.

Live streaming starts soon:

After a long game, which draw the energy of our robots as well as of our humans, we are now officially the winner of the intermediate round.

To our disappointment there where no goals. Although our opponents had massive problems with their robots and where not even present on the field for extended periods we did not manage to score a regular goal (even though our robots did try).

So it came to the penalty shootout.
We did not manage to score there as well, because we shot the ball to far (so we where not allowed to shoot a second time) and to short (so the ball did not reach the goal line).
As the first 5 attempts did not result in any goal the referee ordred the execution of another 5 tries.
The Opponent managed to improve their fieldie so that he was able to make a few shooting attempts – but only one shot deserved that name. Their 10th attempt came close to our goal – and our goalie Glados did throw himself in the correct direction.

The last resort for finding a winner had to be chosen: A race.
The Robot to reach the ball in a shorter time period is the winner.
Both teams managed to update their software to the new challenge within just a minute,
and in the end it was a question of the better hardware.
Our Robots are bigger and have stronger motors, so Tamara did reach the ball in 7 seconds. The enemy did not reach the ball and fell backwards shortly before touching it. Surprisingly Tamara did not fall (though touching the ball while falling would have counted as “reached”).

We are quite happy about entering the second round robin, but the way we reached this games decision was not to our satisfaction.
Our victory was not unearned though, because we where much more present on the field and had a higher ability to play. Also we did shoot 2 goals in the first round robin – whilst our opponent did not manage to score at all.

As our next game will be at 16:45 we are now a little stressed to make a good impression there.
But we’d like to state that it was a good decision to buy new batteries and chargers in advance to this competition, because we are now able to endure long and several games in short succession. We where even able to lend Batteries to the Israeli Team for their penalty shoot-out which had a similarly bad battery situation like we had last year.

At 1:45 am our intermediate game against the “Cyberlords la Salle” will begin. The winner gets to play in the second round robin, the looser wont have any game here anymore.

That is gonna be interesting.

The live-Streaming starts with the game:

The Bold Hearts had the better team and beat us 1:2.
Again there were some critical situations with possibilities of own goals
but both teams were lucky to be spared from this event.

In case of the Bold hearts though it was only because of a controversial referee decision, who declared an “illegal defence” just in the moment when the robot shot the ball into his own goal. So the game could very easily have ended with a draw.
Even though this decision was not according to the rules, it is the referee who has the final say and we accept this decision (especially as own goals are really terrible and the Bold Hearts scored more regular goals than we did).

Our goal scorer again was Tamara, who already scored in Magdeburg and in the first round robin. Of course Tamara is also our youngest robot and accordingly fit concerning the joints. Now she is proudly wearing (besides a new bow in the hair) two badges of silver tape – one for each World Cup goal.