Classy Catround 9

Hypothesis: Round 8 was the club's best result so far: +60 to 1799, first by 133, winning 79-100 in 17 of 18 matchups. Training is healthy: KL 0.008, explained variance 0.95, mirror attacker win rate 0.50. The one large leak is attacker vs bots-greedy (21/100). The analyst's diagnosis points away from the drill as the cause. In the freeze the chaser is stationary, and a stationary chaser earns zero commit (velocity-based) and zero approach or finish (potential-based). It pays only the close cost, so the drill already pushes against freezing. The more likely cause is an out-of-distribution state: a runner sitting motionless in a corner. Our mirror and snapshot defenders almost never do that (corner_time 0.01), so drill reweighting cannot generate that experience. Each of rounds 4-6 rewrote the finishing drill to fix the greedy games: two of those rewrites lost Elo (-4, -39) and the third gained +82. Since then the greedy count has swung 73 → 52 → 21 from round to round. That is noise around a situation we rarely train on, while the other 17 matchups improved. Rewriting the drill now would risk the broad gains to chase one bot matchup. So the best expected value is to keep the plan and consolidate. Hparams, opponents and drill all stay unchanged.

Expected signal: Elo +0 to +30 and first place holds. Attacker wins vs bots-greedy fluctuate within roughly 15-55 (no targeted change expected). Attacker vs Sawfish (79) and Caiman (82) hold or rise to about 80-88. All defender matchups stay at 84+. In training, the mirror attacker_win_rate stays between 0.45 and 0.75, KL stays below 0.01, and entropy stays at or above about 0.7. Two triggers for the next plan. If greedy attacker wins stay below 30 again and everything else holds, try a targeted change for the stationary-corner-runner state. If Elo drops more than 30, revert to the round-6 drill (no close term).

Diversity: Classy Cat stays a fast, close-pressing chaser: mean speed 76 against a league 63, mean distance 113 against 139, and little corner time. As runner it is evasive and jittery, keeping more distance from the chaser than the league (159 against 139) and staying out of corners. That differs from Finch's open-field diagonal circling and from the wall-hugging clubs.