Hello,
Since this year’s tournament is now only a couple of weeks away, we want to give you some information regarding the tournament schedule.
General Tournament Timeline
The local organization has already published the general timeline for the competition on their [homepage](https://2025.robocup.org/schedule/). The main information here is: Team Setup Days: Tuesday 15. - Wednesday 16. July Competition: Thursday 17. - Sunday 20. July Symposium: Monday 21. July (The venue will open on the tournament days from 8:00 on and will close from Tuesday to Saturday at 22:00)
Tournament Style
As we have a reduced number of teams this year, the style used this year got slightly adapted. Due to having only 5 Div A teams this year, the group stage will consist of only one group, where every team is playing once against each of the other teams. The knockout stage will be played in a double elimination stage, with all 5 teams taking part. With currently 8 teams in the Div B, the qualification stage will consist of two groups with each four teams, where all four teams are playing once against each other. In the knockout stage we will also have a double elimination system but start with all 8 teams.
The teams will be drawn into groups using the SSL grouping tool (https://github.com/RoboCup-SSL/ssl-grouping). We have already updated the seeding pools for the Div B for this year's competition. The seeds are primarily determined by last year's results (https://ssl.robocup.org/robocups/robocup-2024/robocup-2024-results/), as well as the participation in previous RC tournaments. Since there are more than two Brazilian teams, but only two groups in Div B, we are unable to fully avoid teams from the same country competing against each other in the group stage. To solve this, we moved one of the Brazilian teams (RoboFEI) to their own nation (denoted as BrazilB in the seeding pool). While we understand this is slightly disappointing, we think this is a better compromise than ignoring the country of origin completely. Since in the Div A all teams will play against all others anyway, the correlation for T1 to T5 to teams is purely done by the ranking in last years competition and as following: T1: TIGERs Mannheim T2: ZJUNlict T3: ER-Force T4: RobôCIn T5: RoboDragons
If you notice any issues with this seeding, please notify us before the 27th of June. This is important since we will draw groups on that day and we have a much harder time adjusting the seeding when the resulting groups are already available.
As we always do, we will use random.org for the random seeds required for the tool. We will draw the groups using the pre-generated random numbers for the 27th of June (which will become available at https://www.random.org/integers/?num=2&min=1&max=10000&col=5&... on that date) to seed our tool. (The numbers are used to seed Division B, as no numbers are required for Division A)
Tournament Schedule
The official SSL schedule for this years can be found here: [RoboCup 2025 Schedule - Official](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1uNMfJM_ZOfLf-vYniD9r53NEZuopjtFN...)
As the tournament days are quite packed, the technical challenges are currently planned to be primarily in the morning of the 16th. Also the slots for the Demo matches against Junior have been picked. Both of them will happen after each other on Saturday between 17:00 - 18:00.
If you have any open questions, feel free to reach out to the OC/TC,
See you in Salvador!
David and Tobi, on behalf of the SSL committee
PS: The local organization is also sending regular newsletters with important and interesting notes about the tournament and everything around it. Therefore please have a look for them. In case you didn't receive them, here are the ones, which have already been sent: [Newsletter #1](https://drive.google.com/file/d/149odDpmagt9dIJpBhQ9mJ2No8ISgJJYf/view?usp=s...) [Newsletter #2](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L1fcfvUgY-oj6_XfEETS3m0EzppYhP8-/view)