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Battlebots Season 2021* Finals Preview: “Everybody Dies”
The seeds of the remaining robots are just unbelievable 4 7 11 14 16 21 24 31 I’ve been talking about how certain weapon types are actively faring (here and here), here’s how I would rank the weapons on the eight remaining robots. 1 Super Vertical Spinner, on a bot that at times reminds me…
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Battlebots Sweet 16 Recap: Paradigm Shift
I guess the canary in the coal mine was last week, when Black Dragon went against the mega-spinner of Madcatter. (If you want to go back even further, you could see the canary in the canary’s coal mine was Hypershock’s wild loss to P1, a case where a robot with a dangerous weapon lost to…
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The Vertical(!!!) Disk Spinner Crisis
(Note: Previously I have broken up this category into two types of vertical disk spinners – regular sized ones and Super Vertical Spinners. The idea being there’s the traditional, more common size, and then there’s this new massive size that has become such a force in the recent BattleBots landscape. Nonetheless, while this post was…
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The Horizontal Spinner Crisis: Spin to (Not) Win
With Rotator now dead and buried, joining the rest, we need to talk about the Horizontal Spinner Crisis happening in Battlebots today Regular Season Records for Horizontal Spinners in 2021* Bloodsport 2-1 Tombstone 2-1 Valkyrie 2-1 Icewave 2-1 HiJinx 2-1 Ok, not so bad right? Well, all of those robots lost their first fight, then…
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Battlebots Playoffs Week 2 Recap: Rise to the Occasion
Many things rose to the occasion this week. Most among them was the show itself, Battlebots. Thank you for a terrific product and some terrific fights. But yeah, I use that title because that’s what I saw, in a few big spots. The underdog winners mostly – Hydra and Black Dragon. Hydra played twice (though…
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Battlebots Week 3 Preview: Sweet 16
I like this concept of previewing the fights in the order of least exciting/compelling to most exciting/compelling. We’re going to do this again while examining regions as a whole. The West: The Young and the Restless (Upper-and-comers at different points in their development) Sawblaze (4) vs P1 (20) I mean, what would a P1 victory…
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Battlebots Week 2 Playoff Picks: Group of DEATH
Hmmm, with the newfound inclusion of fights getting summarized and booted to YouTube (a practice not seen since Season 4), might as well make it a game and try to predict which ones suffer such a fate! Fights are ranked in order of “YouTube Worthiness”, most to least. Which means I’m ranking fights worst to…
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Battlebots Playoff Week 1 Recap: Six Killings and a Funeral
Well, umm, most of that was very straightforward and predictable! And then there was that other fight… Nine fights in week 1, two were ignominously kicked to YouTube and briefly summarized near the end of the episode. And a shame too, because one of those was very interesting and should not be overlooked. The other…gee,…
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My Bracket, and Big Picture Tournament Analysis
I filled out my bracket a few days before the tournament began, the same day as I filled out my March Madness bracket. Synergy Baby! But I forgot to post it here, here’s my tweet from last week. (Man, Battlebots remains as niche as ever even on Twitter in 2022. I’ll remember these rough days…
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Battlebots 2021* Regular Season Awards
As I write this I am still ignorant of what happened in Week 1 of the playoffs. St Patty’s Day, man. I’m getting too old for that shift. Anyhow, I wanted to circle the wagons, review the 10 week regular season and highlight the memorable moments of the year, good and bad. The commendable and…