Chapter 2: Match Play at a Qualifying Event
Introduction
Match play is the main event of the day. Teams spend months building and coding for it, and it takes up most of the hours on your schedule. Almost every planning decision you make — how many fields, how many volunteers, when lunch happens — traces back to keeping matches moving.
Whichever program you host, an event day is built from the same three kinds of match play:
- Qualification Matches
- Finals / Elimination Matches
- Robot Skills Matches
Qualification Matches are the backbone of every competition. All teams at your event play the same number, they fill most of the day, and they produce the rankings that everything afterward depends on.
Qualification Match rankings determine which teams continue to play, and the matches that follow decide the event’s performance awards. The VEX IQ Robotics Competition calls these Finals Matches. The VEX V5 Robotics Competition calls them Elimination Matches and adds a step called Alliance Selection before they begin.
Robot Skills Matches run on their own field alongside Qualification Matches, where one team at a time scores as many points as it can to showcase their driving or coding skills.
How to Work Through This Chapter
The first two lessons cover the same day for different programs. Lesson 1 walks through match play at a VEX IQ event. Lesson 2 does the same for a VEX V5 event.
Read the lesson for the program you're hosting. If you host both, complete both. You'll notice the two lessons repeat each other in places, and that's deliberate: the parts that work the same way in both programs are written the same way, so the differences stand out.
Lesson 3 covers the Robot Skills Challenge, which works the same way in both programs. All Event Partners should complete this lesson.
The time to complete all lessons in this chapter is approximately 45 minutes.