A few more thoughts on a topic that I mentioned in the reports of the games earlier, as I think that this is one thing that led us to the success we’re having right now, and it touches on a thing that I wanted to tell you about anyways. So brace yourself for

What playing in the RZA Elite has taught me #5

I have a confession to make: I stole playbooks. Not one, but three.

And I do feel no remorse from it.

The first one I already told you about. I bet an opponent with his own (simple) play design, just to beat him.

How did I do it? Everyone who’s read the many entries that I have written over the course of the Bootcamp Friendly Cups may have picked up that I’m pretty much a nut with things like these. I draw tables on big sheets of paper and fill them with very small hand written words and abbreviations. I take usually 4 or 5 games of the manager whose playbook I try to emulate and note everything that’s interesting to me.

Sometimes it’s only a checklist of which play comes up when in which part of the field. That’s how I got to the „simple“ one. I’m still conflicted about this, but it’s a fact that it helped us win our very first championship back in S52, when we met exactly that opponent in the playoffs and again beat him with his own weapons. I am inclined to use it again on Sunday, by the way…

Then it’s maybe just looking at a playbook a seasoned manager uses to get some hints at how you can improve things that you thing do not work right for you. That’s how the SEA LIONS seriously improved in their defense in S52… and they’ve been playing with that ever since.

But sometimes it’s a very detailed table one a big sheet, with boxes each to fill with a Formation on Down, Distance and Time (5-minute-steps in each quarter). This way I stole from a prominent manager in this game, because he had beaten us TWICE with this playbook in one season with a squad that was FAR inferior to ours. It was a real eye opener when I tried to replicate in the RZA-playbook what I had noted manually. It was nothing like I thought a playbook should be structured alike. Formations I deemed „dangerous to use“ were involved very prominently, and the way the plays are progressing over the course of one game still is still not really understandable for me.

BUT: It works like a charm. Every game that we’ve played this playbook in was a close one, but with more wins than losses. So the investment paid off.

As I said earlier: I do feel no remorse from it.

And you shouldn’t, too.

Thing is: You don’t really steal these playbooks. It is impossible to get every nuance of a playbook from studying 5 games of play. But it usually is enough to set something up that’s generally working. And after that it’s you all over, because it’s the details that make each playbook unique… and sometimes decisive of who’ll succeed and who’ll fail.

It takes some time, not gonna lie about that. Looking at one game can take 30 minutes if you do it right, and that’s just figuring out how your opponent does it… you still have to make up how you formulate that in your own playbook. Depending on how much time you have at your disposal that can take days or weeks.

Of course it’s all a matter of how successful you wish to be in this game. Investing much time and energy into this can be frustrating, too, and I’ve seen managers leave due to not getting the results they hoped for with all the time they put into the game. I get that. And there’s no shame being a team that’s always there, but never really relevant. Every longtime player in this game is highly appreciated.

But if you want to be successful as in „winning a championship“ you need to take that time and energy and invest. It’s „thinking time“, one thing that I really love about this game. You have to use your brain to come up with something new. Maybe based on something existing, but none of us is re-inventing the wheel anyways. It’s nuanced and, in the end, a game of „I’m more clever than you“.

And sometimes „more clever than you“ also means „I know where to steal from to beat you".

Before we're heading into the playoffs of this friendly cup I want to say that it these playoff match-ups are a bit of a let-down for me, as it is the premise of this Friendly Cup that first and foremost Rookie managers should benefit from this. And having only one of the newbies advancing to the Round of Final 4 in this tournament feels false to me. But maybe that was to be expected, having filled the spots that were open the longest with veteran managed teams.

I hope, though, that the managers of the Black Knights, Theth Viking Bear's and Salopian Flame took away something from the games and the things that were written here.

Thank you for participating. It'll be interesting to see where you can take your teams.

Good luck for your way up

Oh man, it’s Semifinals Game Day already, time really flies. 
These are the match-ups coming today:

Άρις Μεσσηνίας @ Social Distance Runners

It’s Newbie vs. oldest Veteran in this Friendly Cup, and I’m very curious how this match-up is going to turn out. The game plan of the greek offense was a tough one to stand up to in all three games of the group round, although they seem to have lost a bit of steam in past games. Their defense is doing good things also, though, like yesterday when they were able to hold the Bonaval Acorns to only FGs until late in Q3.
But, and that’s almost needless to say, that they will have to fight hard against the Runners, who have won all but 4 (!!!) games (League, Supercup, Friendly Cups AND Friendlies) this season so far

Tennessee Frontiersmen @ HAMBURG SEA LIONS

This one’s going to be interesting. I have already expressed that I’m inclined to use a similar playbook as the Frontiersmen, and our Defense SHOULD be able to stop this attack. But it’s a coin flip game, and I have no idea how this'll turn out. I will have popcorn ready, though

Good luck for everyone

Thanks for the competition Chrill, it was really helpfull.
And no issue about not going further, it is learning phase so totally normal

In case you're wondering: I hurt my hand yesterday playing Flag Football, now I'm slightly handicapped and cannot write as easily

Some insights about the games from yesterday will follow when the swelling has gone down...

Finally some words about the games from the semi final round of this Bootcamp Friendly Cup:

Άρις Μεσσηνίας 21:42 Social Distance Runners

The game could not start any better for the Runners, as they had a 52 Yards Kickoff return and began their first drive on the 41 of Άρις Μεσσηνίας, which they capped off with a touchdown. The latter then missed an opportunity to score when they went for it on 4th Down on the opposing 22 and failed, after which the Runners took the ball the length of the field and scored another tuddie. They couldn’t do much in the 2nd quarter and after two TDs by the men from Aris it was even at the half.
The Greek got the ball to start Q3, but failed again on 4th Down… this time in their own half, though, which made the field short for the Runners who scored a TD from this. This happened again three times in the second half, and the Runners scored two more TDs from these situations. The men from Aris moved the ball good the whole game, but these 4th Down attempts in the end made it easy for the opponent to win the game and advance to the final.

The major issue in this game are the 4th Down attempts by the men from Aris, which made many scores by the Runners easily possible. If these kinks are ironed out and safety becomes a bit more prominent in the gameplay of the Greek they will, I think, accumulate a lot more wins in future games and seasons.

Tennessee Frontiersmen 30:24 HAMBURG SEA LIONS

There was never really a sense during the game that the HAMBURG SEA LIONS could win this one. Every time they touched the ball it was for relative short periods of time while they were not able to get a hold on the attack of the Frontiersmen. Even when the SEA LIONS for the first (and only) time led the game half way through the 4th quarter it was for mere minutes and only because they were able to catch an errant ball thrown by the QB from Tennessee. The team better suited and more experienced to play that kind of game won and will play for the title coming Sunday.

Nothing surprising happened here on the Tennessee side of the ball. They played the same like they played every other game in this tournament, similar to the Greek from Aris.

I made two major mistakes when I set up the game:

1) I took the playbook that I wrote about, the „simple“ one, and just let it play out. I did not, though, fact check if the play would work, given the formations I had set up and the defenses they were likely to meet. Which would have been quite easy to do, as I had only two or three formations to attack with. If I’d checked some of the stats of the games played by the Frontiersmen from this season I would have been able to adjust to maybe a different basic attacking formation, or to chose a different one to rush every now and then and not meet the 5-3-3 defense.

B) I KNEW how the Frontiersmen would play their game. And yes, I was confident that my defensive playbook would hold up against that. But still it would have been more clever, if I’d thought about it a little, to change the basic defensive formation, which is 4-4-3, to 3-4-4… just to have a little more security against the passing game. The engine eventually got there, but by then the damage was done and there was not way to catch up to the opponent anymore.

Of course it doesn’t mean if I avoid these mistakes it would have had us winning. But at least we wouldn’t have constantly run into a stone wall on every rush attempt, or would have had a better chance to get the ball down the field passing.

We’re reaching the end of the third edition of the Bootcamp Friendly Cup, and with this my efforts to extensivly boost the number of words of this forum will come to an end also (at least until the next Bootcamp starts).

I had one more topic to write about, about how investment matters and how I think you can improve your squad by running scrimmages every once in a while, just to iron out kinks in your playbook that will only show over time and will be most maddening if they happen in meaningful games. This is mostly self explanatory, though, as investment ALWAYS pays off, and doing nothing more than the minimum seldom leads to something special.

But something more interesting caught my eye today as I looked up what happens in the Dragons league currently, as this is where we entered the Elite league from (and maybe even return to after this one). And that got me thinking about how new managers experience the game and what it means for their teams to get to a point where they thrive.

I was very surprised to see that the human led teams are the minority in the Dragons league, as I counted 17 bot-teams. When we got there it was one of the leagues that had very few bot-teams, I even believe it was the only one in S52 that had none. That was one major aspect why we changed there, coming from the Admirals league, because back then the latter was littered with bot-teams and we wanted competition which we found in the Dragons league. Interestingly enough it’s almost the other way around now, with the Admirals league having only 6 bot-teams.

This decrease in actual players competing is going on for a while now, as the Creator of this fine game already stated here not long ago. But it does pose a big hurdle for all new managers to take, as it widens the gap between those who are really good and those who still find their footing.

Those who are really good usually are with this game for a very long time now and have the experience or the resources, so they can even come back from a though time faster. Manager lions1934 for example had to rebuild his team completely in S49 due to inadvertently not extending multiple contracts for this roster (you can read about it here). But having been in RZA since S08 he pretty much knew what to do immediately, invested in the right players, had his playbook figured out and was back in the playoffs that same season.

New managers, though, will have to have a pretty thick skin for the first seasons of their career. When there were more managers in the game the transition from bad to good was a lot more balanced, and there were more opportunities to play teams on a level similar to the own. Now it’s a lot of bots, which has no real merit to figuring out the own play, as bots only play one defensive formation and thus give you no chance to figure out if your playbook works to make defenses switch. So it comes down to few games over the course of a season where you play real competition, and chances are that more games than not are against teams with experienced managers, which will likely demolish the new guys.

This, and the fact that the game just takes time to develop, has many managers leave rather early. Just have a look at the teams that played the first two Bootcamp Friendly Cups: of 7 new managers in S52 only one team is still with us (Leadhills Wonderers), from S53 it’s 3 out of 4 new teams (mCon, Neptunes, Braska Bangers 09). It takes a decent amount of commitment and investment to get your team to a point where you can rival the teams in the playoffs, even when it seems easy to get there nowadays. And only playing human led teams a few times in a season, maybe losing these games in crushing manner, really makes it tough to get it right.

Building a strong squad of course helps tremendously. And then I can’t recommend enough to play scrimmages to figure out your playbook, once you started to dive into this. Yes, it will only take you this far, as playing against yourself has its limitations. No scrimmage can substitute for a real game, as your offensive and defensive strategies will only then be really put to a test. But you will be able to see major flaws, which very likely will be exploited on the spot by the good teams, without them having game losing consequences all too often.

And hopefully some of the many words that you’re able to read in this thread will help you with that

It's the final game day of the S57 Bootcamp Friendly Cup today, and this is the match-up for the game:

Tennessee Frontiersmen @ Social Distance Runners

It's only fitting that the Runners will be playing the game today, as they reached this final with a flawless record throughout the tournament. In that they only had one close game that was decided by less than one score. It'll be a tall order to stop their high flight for the opponent. They had some rather easy games this week, which began with a beat down by the allmighty KMN Mandalorians... so maybe they can be caught off guard today.

The Frontiersmen come in with confidence. They may have lost one in the group round of this cup, but had strong outings in every other game and showed that, despite playing the game rather simple, they have their strengths figured out and know how to play to them accordingly. In this past week they won against teams like the Dumbarajko Elephants, the Sydney Sea Eagles and the Devon Dog Soldiers. They surely have no need to hide today.

Good luck to both, we're looking forward to a great game

Congrats to the Social Distance Runners

on winning the 3rd Bootcamp Friendly Cup

And here’s the final summary with thoughts for the last game of the S57 Bootcamp Friendly Cup:

Tennessee Frontiersmen 23:33 Social Distance Runners

The Social Distance Runners got off to a good start yesterday by stopping the opponent on their first possession and then driving all the way down the field to score the first TD of the game. They forced another turnover after that, but then their QB threw an errant interception which the Frontiersmen took back to the opposing 41 yard line to score a TD 4 plays later. The teams after that traded field goals first, then TDs, and a minute before half time the CB of the Runners picked a pass from the QB of Tennessee and the Runners scored another field goal, making it 20:17 at the half in favor of the home team. They scored another touchdown with their first possession in the second half, before their defense took over, not letting the Frontiersmen score more than two field goals for the whole second half. It was getting close in the fourth quarter for a few minutes, but then the Runners held on to the ball for nearly 6 minutes to score the final touchdown of the game. The Frontiersmen tried to come back from that, but two more interceptions, the final one at the one minute mark on the opposing 7 yard line, sealed the deal and had the Runners come out on top in this great final.

The thing that surprised me the most when I looked at the game and the stats was the fact that the defense of the Social Distance Runners was rather simple. If you followed what I wrote about many games here and in some other contexts you know that I’m pretty much convinced that you should have a diverse defense in which one offensive formation is met by multiple defensive formations over the course of a game in order to stop the attack properly. Well, the Runners proved me wrong in this regard. In fact it was the Frontiersmen that showed way more diversity on the defensive side of the ball.

But the Runners did what is another pet peeve of mine: they ran the ball. And they did so to attack defensive formations that the SEA LIONS could have exploited one week earlier the same way if they’d cared to look it up before the game. Overall 30 carries for 220 Yards, which means they had 7.3 Yards per carry. That’s crazy, but happened, because the Frontiersmen defended 21 of these carries with 3-man-fronts, 9 of them even in prevent defense 3-1-7, so the ballcarriers had no problem getting to the second level. And so slowly but surely they gained yardage and ate the clock, which is a clever way of winning the game.

And that was it for the third iteration of the Bootcamp Friendly Cup. We hope everyone got something out of this. If there’s still questions don’t hesitate to ask, as we’ll be glad to help. Until then we wish everyone good luck and a good final stretch of the season