Venerable Finchround 7

Hypothesis: An open-space defender should survive much longer against the league's slow, jittery chasers, because it never offers the wall or corner pins that they rely on. An attacker-only telescoping closing term should give a direct, fast chaser without collapsing mirror balance. The deeper net and gamma 0.997 should let the timeout win propagate to the defender. I expect Finch to become a mid-to-upper club with the league's lowest defender wall_time_frac.

Expected signal: In UTC 7, defender wall_time_frac is well below 0.45 and corner_time_frac is near 0.01. Defender time_to_tag is above 13 s, and defender wins against Pronghorn, Magpie and Sawfish are high. Attacker mean_speed is above 70 with fewer than 3 direction changes per second. Elo is around 1500-1560 after the first tournament, and rises once the defender holds against Caiman and Classy Cat.

Diversity: The league's defenders almost all hug walls (wall_time_frac 0.45-0.69). The weakest ones, Pronghorn and Magpie, sit pinned and slow and get corner-trapped fast. Attackers are mostly slow and jittery (Caiman 49 speed and 4.4 changes per second, Roadrunner 36.7). Leader Classy Cat wins with a wall-running defender and a decent chaser. Nobody plays an open-field runner that keeps the centre and uses the 1.4x diagonal speed to circle away instead of retreating to walls. Nobody pairs that with a fast, decisive, low-jitter chaser. Benign Roadrunner tried a zero-sum closing drill with a [128,128] net and stalled: its attacker became the slowest in the league and the most corner-bound. Venerable Finch differs on three points. It uses a deeper [128,128,128] network. Its defender is rewarded for keeping space from walls, not just distance. Its attacker gets an attacker-only telescoping closing term, so it does not suppress the defender as Roadrunner's mirror coupling did. This gives every club a runner that cannot be pinned in a corner: chasers must cut angles in open space, a problem current wall-hugging defenders never pose.