After not just one, but two consecutive victories in the friendly matches yesterday evening, our team had to be at the venue early again today. At 8:30 AM, our match against RoboCin took place — a complete nail-biter. Neither side gave an inch, and it was a bitterly fought battle.

With so much suspense, it’s hard to stay in your seat.

After two halves, our batteries were close to their limit, but we pushed through both Halftimes. With the score still locked at 0-0, we had no choice but to go into the penalty shootout, which is similar to a penalty shootout in traditional soccer.

One of our members had completely reimplemented the shootout code after last year’s disaster, but it became clear during the game that this was causing our strategy to crash. So, a quick fix was desperately needed. The man of the hour and our savior was Michel. During the remaining match time, he quickly checked and adjusted the existing code so that it could actually run in the penalty shootout, allowing us to secure a 2-1 victory.
This means one thing is certain: in the worst-case scenario, we can now only drop to 3rd place.

Our next match will take place at 5:30 PM local time (10:30 AM German time) against Tigers Mannheim. The long-standing world champions of the league had a few issues with the venue’s network at the beginning of the competition, but those have surely been resolved by now.
Therefore, we are heading into this match rather pessimistically, but of course, we won’t give up. We will fight until the very end.

It is also worth mentioning that today at 2:30 PM local time, this year’s league photo was taken on the large Div A field. It is beautiful to see every year just how large and diverse our league has become. Right after that, the traditional RoboCup picture was taken as well. This brought out rather mixed feelings.
On one hand, joy over how many parts of the world are united under the banner of the RoboCup; on the other hand, sadness and displeasure because our league will soon no longer be part of RoboCup International. This exclusion of our league was decided last year by the competition’s trustees and will take effect after next year’s competition. Fortunately, however, we are still allowed to participate in regional events.