DECISION SUMMARY

BFT entered 1-0-1 — a draw and a win, mid-pack. The Round 3 pairing put them against BDE at 2-0-0, an undefeated team and one of the stronger fields at the event, carrying what Riley dryly called “a modest 8 Defilers to tackle.” BFT’s goal was explicit: beat the undefeated team, knock it down the standings, and clear BFT’s own path to contend.

They did, conclusively: BFT 135, BDE 25. A 110-point aggregate margin, seven games to one — the largest result in BFT’s CHTT run. But the entry is in the Archive for a more specific reason than the scoreline. Round 3 is the round where two pairing decisions Riley honestly calls “blunders” still produced near-maximum wins — because BFT’s roster had so many positive matchups available that even a disrupted plan landed somewhere good. And it is the round where the soft spot the Round 2 entry flagged finally resolved: the three BFT players who had struggled across Rounds 1 and 2 each got the matchup their list was built for, and each posted big.

THE TEAMS

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

• Astra Militarum, Grizzled Company — JagAll-comers, 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 (“BDE”). Roster as Riley characterized it:

• Chaos Space Marines, Renegade Raiders — PhilAbaddon and Defilers.
• Adeptus Custodes, Talons of the Emperor — AJGuard and Allarus bricks.
• Emperor’s Children, Coterie of the Conceited — JeanDefilers and Princes.
• Necrons, Awakened Dynasty — Liam BathKing, C’tan, Wraiths.
• Astra Militarum, Recon Element — CharlieA Recon body-spam list — the army BFT’s GSC was built to pin.
• Death Guard, Plague Company — ZachMortarion and Defilers.
• Thousand Sons, Warpforged Cabal — StephA near-mirror of Riley’s own list.
• Blood Angels, Sons of Sanguinius — PatrickDeath Company and Sanguinary Guard.

THE STRATEGIC PICTURE

Riley’s pre-round read:

Two three-deep pins — one on BDE’s Recon Guard, one on its Custodes — and two lists to handle with care: BDE’s Death Guard, and the Thousand Sons mirror, where BFT could expect no matchup edge against a near-copy of its own captain’s list.

PUSH 1 · THE OPENING PAIRINGS

BFT first defender: Astra Militarum (Jag). BDE attacked with Blood Angels and Recon Guard. BFT championed Blood Angels — a favoured Guard matchup, with a light board chosen to make the melee-dependent Blood Angels harder to stage, and Recon Guard declined to keep it intact for the planned pin.

BDE first defender: Custodes (AJ). BFT attacked with Thousand Sons and CSM, the Custodes pin. Here the plan met an opposing counter-move. BFT wanted BDE to champion CSM — it was BFT’s cleanest Custodes answer, and it would keep Riley’s Thousand Sons in hand as a threat for later pushes. BDE instead championed Thousand Sons, reasoning that a heavy table would let the Custodes blunt the Thousand Sons output. Riley calls this the round’s first blunder — not BDE’s, his own: BFT had not planned for losing the Thousand Sons threat-piece this early. Hold that label; the round revisits it.

PUSH 2 · THE SECOND BLUNDER

BFT second defender: Deathwatch (Kas). BDE attacked with EC and Recon Guard. BFT championed EC, keeping Recon Guard for the scrum pin.

BDE second defender: Thousand Sons (the mirror, Steph). BFT attacked with Drukhari and Necrons. BFT preferred Drukhari to be championed; BDE rejected Drukhari and championed Necrons. Riley calls this the second blunder:

BFT routed its Necrons into the mirror-match Thousand Sons without realising the cell was strong.

PUSH 3 + THE SCRUM · THE ROBBERY

BFT third defender: Emperor’s Children (François). BDE attacked François with Death Guard and CSM — two Defiler builds. BFT championed CSM, sending Death Guard into the rejected scrum pairing.

BDE third defender: Necrons (Liam Bath). BFT attacked with Drukhari and CSM. As the scrum resolved, the two earlier “blunders” reshuffled which rejected and champion cards landed where — and the final eight pairings came out:

RESULT

Round score: BFT 135, BDE 25 — BFT win. Game record: 7 wins, 1 loss.

BFT’s matrix predicted a differential sum of +6 — eight mildly-favourable matchups. The actual differential was +110. Riley: “An hour into the round the squad had pulled 80 battle points out of the first four games — a perfect score.” The one loss was not a loss in the ordinary sense: Tim’s CSM into BDE’s Necrons was a deliberate damage-limit game, played for a narrow margin, and 9-11 is Riley’s “draw game successful as planned.”

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 is least bad.

Solver vs Riley — Push 1 defender. Fed BFT’s round-3 matrix, the solver’s maximin ranking puts Devin and Riley tied at the top with a worst-case RowMin of +1 — the only round in BFT’s CHTT run where the matrix is rich enough that the solver’s best defenders carry a positive worst case. The solver recommends Devin. Riley defended Jag, a RowMin of 0 — one step below the solver’s pick.

This is a mild divergence, not an override. Riley reached for “the tried and tested Guard as our first defender” — his reliable default — accepting a one-point-worse maximin floor for the reliability and table-pick value Jag carries (the same value the Round 2 analysis turns on). With the matrix this green, a one-step concession on the Push 1 floor barely moves the round; the solver’s full-lookahead value off Riley’s line is still comfortably positive. Riley spent a small, quantifiable amount of paper-optimality to defend with the player he trusts most in the role — a defensible trade when the whole grid is favourable.

Robustness: TIGHT. Devin and Riley tie at +1; the gap to the rest is one step. The Push 1 choice is, again, a judgment call within a near-equivalent set rather than a forced move.

Solver said: defend Devin, maximin RowMin +1, full-lookahead round value +1. Riley called: Jag, RowMin 0 — one below. Outcome: 135-25, a 110-point rout. The gap between the solver’s +1 maximin floor and the actual +110 is the post-mortem’s point exactly — when a roster carries seven positive matchups, the Push 1 defender choice is a rounding error against the depth of the board. The solver and the captain were one step apart on a decision that, this round, the roster made nearly irrelevant.

POST-MORTEM

Blunders a deep roster can afford. The round’s most useful captain-craft lesson is in the two decisions Riley labels “blunders.” In Defender 1, BDE championed Thousand Sons into its Custodes rather than the CSM that BFT wanted there — costing BFT its plan to hold the Thousand Sons threat-piece for later. In Defender 2, BDE rejected Drukhari and routed BFT’s Necrons into the Thousand Sons mirror, a cell BFT hadn’t realised was strong. Both were genuine disruptions of the plan; Riley’s honesty in calling them blunders is the right call. But both produced near-maximum results — Riley’s Thousand Sons went 20-0 into the Custodes, the Necrons went 19-1 into the mirror.

The lesson is not “the blunders didn’t matter.” It’s that a roster with seven positive matchups available absorbs pairing mistakes. When every branch of the dance leads somewhere good, a disrupted plan still lands well — the disruption changes which good outcome happens, not whether one does. The corollary, stated as a warning rather than a comfort: this only holds when the roster is genuinely that deep. A team with two positive matchups and six coin-flips does not get to be sloppy in the dance and call it a robbery. Round 3 is what pairing looks like when list-building has already won most of the argument before the captains sit down.

The soft spot, resolved. The Round 2 entry flagged a thread: François (EC), Kas (Deathwatch) and Stu (GSC) had struggled in both Round 1 and Round 2, and Riley closed that round’s intake saying he wanted “to get them something better next round.” Round 3 is that round. Each of the three landed the matchup its list was built for, and each delivered — François 20-0 into CSM, Kas 13-7 into EC, Stu 20-0 into the Recon Guard. Stu’s is the clearest: Recon Guard was the army BFT’s roster was constructed to pin, Round 3 was the first time BFT faced one, and the counter (GSC) landed into it.

A captain who names a roster weakness after Round 2 and resolves it in Round 3 is doing multi-round team management, not just single-round pairing; the two entries should be read as a set.

The table, fumbled by the opponent. The table thread that runs through BFT’s CHTT rounds reaches its third variation here. Round 1: BFT missed the table (the Custodes “Super L” layout cost a round win). Round 2: BFT chose the table (Jag handed the optimal layout). Round 3: the opponent mis-chose the table. BDE held table choice for the Riley-vs-Custodes game and, intending to take a heavy board that would blunt the Thousand Sons, “unknowingly picked one of the tables my army operates best on — Table 1.”

BDE’s reasoning at the championship step (take Thousand Sons on a heavy table) was sound in the abstract and failed at the table-selection step, because the specific heavy table available was the wrong one. Same lesson as Round 1, seen from the other side of the table: a plan that is correct at the matchup level can still fail at the layout level, and the layer past the matrix decides games.

Why the rout. Round 3 is not a story of a brilliant pairing dance — Riley would be the first to say two of his pushes got disrupted. It is a story of a team whose list-building gave it seven positive matchups to work with, a captain who put each player into the cell their list wanted (including the three who had been starved of good matchups for two rounds), and an opponent whose one table decision went the wrong way. The robbery was set up before the round started; the dance just had to not give it back, and even two blunders couldn’t.