PUNTERS FANTASY CYCLING LEAGUE
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PFCL3
The free agents list is being populated by the riders known to ride for the World Tour, Pro Continental and all the Women teams. I will publish the free agents list probably around 10 december as right now a number of teams are still adding cyclist to the official roster. I will post a twitter message with the opening of the draft and from then on the drafts can be send in. There will be a post update with the new free agents list along with instructions.
Until that time, all managers are devising strategies on how to draft their team with the best result. And have asked various questions about the drafting of the riders; "Should I go for the absolute top of last year and pick Sagan or Greg van Avermaet as my team star and spend more than half my budget on him?" "Should I go for sprinters or GC riders as my main point grabbers?" "Should I go the the overall win in the TdF and grab those easy £40 and see what the rest brings me?" "Should I go for riders that will compete in both the Giro as the Vuelta, as they will grab more points for the overall top scoring position which yields £50?" "Should I invest heavily in the 2 women of my team and risk missing out on top men cyclist or the other way around?" "What do the previous podium winners of last year have for advice?" "Should I go for cobble classic riders first and will the be interesting free agents left in the transfer window?" As a rookie myself I'm no good in giving advice, but what I can say is that I am very much looking forward to the draft and to all the possibilities to explore. I've theorized many possibilities, in riders that might get good points, but so far that has been the easier part. The hard part is predicting what riders other managers would pick at what cost. Have the feeling I lack experience there and this might come to haunt me. I might also have beginners luck and end up with all the riders I want including Sagan for $1 because everybody think all the others are going for him... That might just happen, right?
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The fixtures for PFCL season 3 are known. In the coming weeks the calendar might change slightly, but this will only affect which race is assigned to which round, and won't have an impact on the fixtures. If we look at the top 3 of last year; @cyclingmole will face rookie @ArjanZoer, @padsbet has also drawn a rookie for the round in @jswadswad and @mheuts75 has drawn veteran @jamiehaughey as his first opponent. All the fixtures of the coming rounds can be found in the PFCL3 FIXTURES page on this blog
Almost all teams have confirmed their subscription to the league by PayPal-ling the entry fee. So now I'm preparing the setup for the first round of the draft. This will consist of a list of all "known" male riders of the World Tour and Pro Continental teams as well all the riders for the women teams.
The draft will be run in several rounds each round begins with the release of the free agents list and the updated team budget. In order to enter a valid draft for your team;
After the deadline the results will be computed and the winner per cyclist will be determined by a number of rules in order to have a no team at an advantage.
To illustrate the rules, a draft example below is created with 2 teams competing in the round
So, the rules are pretty straight forward, but the strategies for the draft have lost of variables to consider when filling in the round, especially since there will be 26 team competing for all the stars in cycling! On the other hand, we all need 10 male and 2 female cyclist in our team and every round you can bid on 10 cyclist... that can't be hard ;) I think something was buzzing in the back of my head when I wrote the sentence in my email; "If we do need to increase the number to 26 (because of participants that I have missed in the process?), that is also doable. ". Turns out I had missed @pj_jarvis (last years nr 5 in the league) and I feel he is very eligible to join. To make it and even league again, I've also invited @KarlisPauzers again and he also wants a shot to improve his 18th place of last year.
So fellow managers, we are now in a league of 26, which means 50 play rounds and the calendar will therefor be slightly changed in the coming week. After this the fixtures will also be published here. However, this also means more money in the price pool. New distibution of the pricemoney will be;
3As mentioned in the Twitter message; we are full and are boarding. In total 24 managers have signed up for next years season, 16 have already paid their subscription fee. The other 8 will follow shortly I guess. Details are in the email I've send out.
The 24 participating managers in order of official subscription. This order will be used in creating the fixtures. *update* we now have 26 managers participating and all have finalized their onboarding I've had some questions about last year by first-time managers in the league. Being a first time manager myself and having a peak at last year's draft and scored points helped me in theory-crafting about the draft. So here is a link to a recap file of PFCL season 2; https://zoer.stackstorage.com/s/Cdy9QduniypC0XN I have also created a draft of the calendar for season 3. It can be accessed via the menu in the top left corner. RULES and Setup
For those who have participated in the first 2 seasons of PFCL with @Padbets running it, things should sound familiar. Even copied most of the information from his emails. For those who are new to the league, let me try to explain.
Punters Fantasy Cycling League let's a manager select his team through a draft system before the start of the season. The team has to consist of 10 male and 2 female cyclists. This team will score points as the riders are in the top 10 result of a race from the calendar. So far a regular kind of prediction game. However the league part is what makes it interesting; the races are grouped together in rounds or match-days (the grand tours won't be grouped, but will be one of the rounds). This creates a fixture where teams are matched-up and can score 2 points for a victory or 1 point for a draw. These results of the fixtures are summarized in the league table. Pricepool The entrance fee will be £15 per team of which roughly £2 goes into admin and the rest goes in the price pool. If we have 26 teams participating we could have this price-pool distribution;
Draft Everyone will start with $100 as their budget. The rounds will go on until all the teams are full, you can bid for up to 10 riders in each round. DO NOT place bids which amount to more than the budget you have remaining, so in the first round do not submit bids for 10 riders for amounts which add up to over $100. At each deadline of the auction, the largest bid for each rider will be determined and that rider will be allocated to the team that won the auction. The amount that you submitted for the rider will be deducted from your budget, regardless of what bids other people made for that rider. If you win too many bids and it takes you over the limit of 12 riders, the preference order from the email will be used and your team will be filled with the required number of riders in the order of preference. The minimum bid is $0. If you bid $0 for a rider, if no other team makes a bid for that rider, you will win the auction and get the rider for free. Bids can be made in increments of 0.1. So, a bid of $4.5 or $4.6 would be acceptable, but a bid of $4.55 is not. Draft Deadlines The deadlines for each round of auctions will be as follows, I stress these are deadlines, you can submit your bids way in advance:
This should get all the bidding done by the time the season starts (first race will be 7th of January) and should give people time to consider their bids and not have to rush making any decisions, particularly given that I know people are often very busy around December and the Christmas period. I will try to get the results out by the following morning. I will send out the list of players that have joined each team and information on the remaining budget for each manager. I know we have managers from various difference time zones so all these timings are in Amsterdam time GMT+1, Do have a good think about your draft bidding strategies, there are plenty of articles about fantasy draft bidding, most for nfl but the same principles apply. Redraft During the season we'll have 2 "transfer" or rather re-draft windows. This will start with the option for teams to release riders and get half their value refunded in return. After this I will make the team overview including budgets and the free-agentlist. The re-draft will start after this with every 2 days a round until all teams are full again. Last week of April and June will be a re-draft windows. Deadlines and detail will be posted here in due time. In the fixtures it will also show when the redrafted teams will count in the scoring. Calendar The calendar will consist of all UCI races *.1+ races for man and *.2+ for women, excluding TTT's and will and be to grouped into the rounds or match-days. The total calendar and the consisting of the rounds or match-days will be here as well. The UCI calendar is still under construction, but as it looks now on http://www.uci.ch/road/calendar/ we'll have around 90 women's and 190 men's races grouped into 48 rounds. Points The cyclist will score points according to race-type and Classification listed below, TTT's are excluded. |
Author@ArjanZoer will be running season 3 of the PFCL Archives
October 2017
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