DECISION SUMMARY

BFT entered 0-0-1 off a Round 1 draw. The Round 2 pairing put them against Chimera — the other team that had drawn its Round 1 — in what was effectively a draw-bracket meeting. Riley walked in with a clear read: “We knew we were the better team and needed to get a big win to recover team morale.” This was a round BFT needed to win, and win loudly.

They did. BFT 103, Chimera 57 — a 46-point aggregate margin, the statement result Riley wanted. But the entry’s interest isn’t the scoreline; it’s that Round 2 is Round 1’s lesson, cashed. Round 1 turned on a table BFT failed to account for — the Custodes “Super L” layout that flipped a predicted +1 into a 2-18 loss and cost BFT the round win. In Round 2, the same player — Jag, BFT’s Astra Militarum first defender — is deliberately handed the optimal table, and the matchup the matrix rated as a flat 0 finishes 17-3. One round after the table miss, the table is a weapon.

THE TEAMS

Blunt Force Trauma (BFT). Pairings captain: Riley Tremblay (Thousand Sons). Roster unchanged across the event:

• Astra Militarum, Grizzled Company — JagAll-comers, the stable first defender that gets positive matchups on table pick.
• Chaos Space Marines, Renegade Raiders — TimA Rhino-heavy blunting attacker.
• Necrons, Starshatter — DevinTurbogreed Triple C’tan; the “Princess” slotted into a chosen matchup.
• Deathwatch, Black Spear Task Force — Kasra5 Kill Team brick; targets infantry builds, scores stably.
• Genestealer Cults, Outlander Claw — Stu20-Bike Triple Grinder; a stable blunter against T3 armies.
• Thousand Sons, Warpforged Cabal — RileyTriple Prince Triple Defiler; Riley’s own list, the threat-piece.
• Drukhari, Spectacle of Spite — JBTriple Scourge; built to attack light boards.
• Emperor’s Children, Coterie of the Conceited — FrançoisDouble Defiler Double Prince — aggressive.

Opposing team (“Chimera”). Roster as Riley characterized it:

• Adeptus Custodes, Talons of the Emperor — AkashLand Raiders + Guard spam.
• Space Wolves, Champions of Russ — EricMax Wulfen with a terminator brick.
• Emperor’s Children, Coterie of the Conceited — JakeA double-Defiler list.
• T’au Empire, Retaliation Cadre — MikeDouble Rampager, double Riptide.
• Necrons, Awakened Dynasty — RyanC’tan with Tomb Blades.
• Death Guard, Plague Company — TJMortarion with double Defiler — the matchup BFT most wanted to control.
• Adeptus Mechanicus, Skitarii Hunter Cohort — TroySicaran spam.
• Adepta Sororitas, Hallowed Martyrs — ZachTriple Immolator triple Retributor.

THE STRATEGIC PICTURE

Riley’s pre-round read:

Four priorities:

• Guard (Jag) as the reliable first defender — the role Round 1 had abandoned and Round 2 restored.
• A pin on Chimera’s Custodes with Thousand Sons backing it.
• Route GSC into one of Chimera’s T3-heavy armies where it blends infantry.
• Pull Chimera’s Death Guard out of the scrum — TJ’s Mortarion-plus-double-Defiler list was the matchup BFT most wanted on a table of its own choosing rather than loose in the unscripted pairings.

PUSH 1 · THE SIGNATURE CHAMPIONSHIP

BFT first defender: Astra Militarum (Jag). Chimera attacked with Death Guard and Space Wolves. BFT championed Death Guard — and this is the round’s signature decision. Riley calls it “a no-brainer to pull DG out of their pool and let Jag get the optimal table to counter Defilers.” Two things happen in one champion choice: the Death Guard “problem” is resolved into a controlled, known pairing instead of a scrum wildcard, and Jag — the player who lost Round 1 on a table BFT hadn’t rated — is this time positioned on the table BFT wants. The table is no longer the variable that happens to BFT; it’s the variable BFT is choosing.

Chimera first defender: Ad Mech (Troy). BFT attacked with GSC and Deathwatch, the two infantry blenders. Riley: “This would break up a pin on the Sisters, but getting the win into one of our problem matchups was seen as more important.” A real trade — BFT spent a pin to land a player into a matchup that mattered more. Chimera championed GSC.

PUSH 2 · THE FORWARD-LOOKING CHAMPIONSHIP

BFT second defender: Necrons (Devin). Chimera attacked with Tau and Sisters. BFT championed Tau — explicitly “to prevent a future table pick for them.” The table-as-variable thinking again: BFT championed the matchup that denied Chimera’s Tau a favourable table later in the dance.

Chimera second defender: Custodes (Akash). BFT’s standing rule — attack every Custodes — forced François (EC) into it. Riley’s read carried a priced-in risk:

Hold that clause; it matters in the result.

PUSH 3 · STEERING THE CHAMPION PAIRINGS

BFT third defender: CSM (Tim). Defended on a neutral remaining matrix, which preserved a pin on Chimera’s EC and Necrons. Chimera attacked with Space Wolves and EC. BFT championed Space Wolves, because — Riley’s logic — “EC falling to the rejecteds was a guaranteed big win,” steering Chimera’s EC into the leftover scrum pairing where it would meet Riley’s Thousand Sons.

Chimera third defender: Necrons (Ryan). BFT attacked with Thousand Sons and Deathwatch, chosen for rejection flexibility. Chimera championed Deathwatch, leaving the two champion pairings BFT had steered toward: Riley’s TSons into Chimera’s EC, and JB’s Drukhari into Chimera’s Sisters.

RESULT

Round score: BFT 103, Chimera 57 — BFT win. Game record: 4 wins, 1 draw, 3 losses.

BFT’s matrix predicted a differential sum of +6. The actual differential was +46. The pairing produced eight mildly-favourable-to-neutral matchups; the games then ran far past the predictions. The BFT scoring shape from Round 1 repeated and amplified — four big wins (+12, +16, +14, +20) against three small losses (−8, −4, −4) and a draw. A team can lose or draw half its games and still win a round by 46 if the wins are routs and the losses are kept close. That asymmetry — maximise the wins, blunt the losses — is the entire point of the pairing dance, and Round 2 is the clean demonstration.

BACKWARD-INDUCTION ANALYSIS · SOLVER vs RILEY

The Archive runs every captain matrix through a WTC sequential solver — a backward-induction model of the real three-push pairing dance, modelling the adversarial game where the opponent has agency. Its headline output is the maximin Push 1 defender: the defender whose worst case across the opponent’s replies is least bad.

Solver vs Riley — Push 1 defender. This is the round’s clean captain-override. Fed BFT’s round-2 matrix, the solver’s maximin ranking is lopsided: Kas and JB tie at the top with a worst-case RowMin of 0, and every other BFT defender — Tim, Jag, Stu, Riley, François — sits at −2 (Devin at −3). The solver’s recommendation is Kas. Riley defended Jag — a defender the model rates two full points worse in worst-case than the available Kas or JB.

This is exactly the case the Archive’s methodology is built to surface: the captain overrode the solver, and the round went 103-57. The override is not a blunder, and the reason is precise. The solver’s matrix encodes matchup quality and nothing else. It cannot encode table pick — and Jag’s entire design, in Riley’s own words, is “a stable first defender that gets positive matchups based on table pick.” The −2 RowMin is the solver pricing Jag’s worst-case matchup on paper; it is structurally blind to the table-selection edge that is the whole point of defending with Jag. Riley is not ignoring the model — he is correcting for a variable the model provably does not carry. The Jag-into-Death-Guard game then finished 17-3 (see the post-mortem: “the table, taken”), a +14 swing over its matrix prediction, produced by exactly the table-pick mechanism the solver cannot see.

Robustness: TIGHT — but in an unusual way. The gap between the top two RowMins (Kas and JB, both 0) is 0, a tie at the top; the choice within the solver’s frame is between those two. The deeper point is that Riley’s actual choice sat outside the solver’s frame entirely, and was right to.

Solver said: defend Kas (or JB), maximin RowMin 0, full-lookahead round value +0. Riley called: Jag, a −2-RowMin defender on the solver’s reading. Outcome: 103-57, a 46-point win — the matrix-blind table-pick dimension converting the solver’s “worst case” into the round’s biggest single game. The solver was not wrong about the matrix; the matrix was not the whole decision.

POST-MORTEM

The table, taken. Round 1’s teachable miss was the Custodes “Super L” table — a layout inside a correctly-pinned pairing that BFT never rated, that flipped Jag’s predicted +1 into a 2-18, that cost BFT a round win. Round 2 is the answer. Jag is again the first defender; this time the champion choice (pulling Death Guard onto Jag) is made with the table explicitly in mind — “let Jag get the optimal table to counter Defilers.” The matchup matrix rated Jag vs Death Guard a flat 0. With the table BFT chose, it finished 17-3. The +14 swing over prediction is the table doing the work — the exact mechanism that cost Round 1, running in reverse. A captain who learns a lesson at the cost of a round win, and applies it one round later for a +14 swing, is the kind of decision the Archive exists to record.

The table thinking shows up a third time in the same round: BFT’s Push 2 champion choice (taking Tau) was made “to prevent a future table pick for them.” Round 1’s blind spot has become, one round on, a lens Riley is looking through at multiple points in the dance.

A correctly-priced risk that still lost. François into Custodes is the round’s instructive loss. Riley’s pairing decision named the exact failure mode in advance — EC beats Custodes “so long as they don’t make all their 4++s.” The Custodes then didn’t fail an invuln on the critical turn, banked early primary, and won 8-12. This is worth stating plainly: pricing a matchup’s variance correctly does not protect you from the variance. Riley made the right call with the risk identified, and the risk landed anyway. Not every loss in the Archive is a mistake — some are a captain reading the dice correctly and the dice not caring.

Two coin flips before the game. Stu’s GSC into Ad Mech is the other instructive loss. Riley notes the matchup is decided by two pre-game rolls — the attacker/defender roll and the go-first roll — that set whether it plays as a 12-8, a 10-10, or an 8-12. Stu lost both and got the 8-12. Riley’s framing is honest: “Below matrix, but it was one of the two best matchups for GSC out of the possible matchups against this team.” The pairing routed Stu into a defensible cell; the cell’s outcome was settled before a model moved.

The recurring soft spot. Riley’s closing note flags something that becomes a thread across the CHTT set: “EC, DW and GSC had another rough round — will want to get them something better next round.” François (EC), Kas (DW), and Stu (GSC) struggled in Round 1 and again in Round 2. A captain tracking which third of his roster keeps landing in the hard matchups — and resolving to fix it — is a piece of multi-round captain self-management. Round 3 is where that thread resolves.

Why the round was won so cleanly. Unlike Round 1 — where a sound plan was undercut by an unrated table — Round 2 is a sound plan with the table accounted for. The pairing produced the matchups BFT wanted; the table was chosen rather than suffered; the threat list (Death Guard) was pulled into a controlled pairing; and the players posted routs in the favourable cells. The 46-point margin is what the pairing dance looks like when the captain has closed the blind spot the previous round exposed.