Fantasy Nordic

FAQ/Instructions:

What is this site all about?

I recently realized that possibly the only sport left on the planet without a website to play a "fantasy" version of it was Nordic Skiing. This website seeks to fill that void.

How does it work?

To play "fantasy nordic", you need to be part of a league. A league is a group of people who are playing against each other. A skier can only belong to one person in each league.

Players are bought and sold via auctions, instead of the "draft" method that many fantasy leagues employ. This is mainly to increase the strategic elements of the game, and to guard against the "whomever gets Marit Bjoergen wins" factor. With an auction method, whoever gets Marit Bjoergen will presumably have to pay so much that their team is deficient in other areas.

The league starts when the league admin (whomever created the league) starts it. After that point, no one else can join, and the top skiers from the previous year are auctioned off automatically over a period of time. These auctions last (by default) a day, and thus starting the league does not require the immediate presence of everyone in it, although everyone will need to access the website within 24 hours if they want to bid on the first skier.

When the initial auto-auction period has ended, and the top skiers have been bought, the season begins. Any player may open an auction on a skier who has not yet been bought, or sell a skier they own to the highest bidder. This continues throughout the season. Everyone gets an additional $1000 after the opening auctions.

Whenever a World Cup, World Championship or Olympic race happens, all players in the league rank their skiers in "scoring preference" (more on that later), and once the races has ended points are awarded to each team based on how their skiers did. If you scored more points than your opponent (each week you're matched up against one other player's team), then you win!

Scoring Preference?

For each race, a team can score points from up to 4 skiers (default, but can be changed by league admin) of each gender. If you have more than 4 skiers of that gender, then you need to specify which one you want to take points from before the race happens.

Instead of choosing "these 4 count" and "these other skiers don't," you need to rank your skiers. The reason to do this is so that, if one of your "top 4" doesn't enter the race, then your 4th skiers will automatically be counted instead. If two of your top 4 don't enter, then your 5th and 6th will be counted, and so on.

This is because start lists are often posted the night before a race and hard to find. Instead of forcing players to try to find out who exactly is going to start in a race, they can just say "Marit Bjoergen is my #1 skier, but if she doesn't enter, move everyone else up a notch."

What about weeks and matchups and playoffs and stuff?

Each "week" is four races on the world cup calendar, or occasionally six if the schedule is strange. Just like any other fantasy sport you'll have an opponent for that week, and you get a win or a loss based on who scores more points. Should be pretty straightforward. Depending on league setup, you can have playoffs of 2, 4, 6 or 8 teams to determine a winner, or you can just go with best W-L record. You could even go with just total points, and ignore the W-L. It's not like you're playing this for money... I hope.

For maximum excitement, I'd recommend a league setup where around 2/3rds of the teams make the playoffs. This means that very few people will be eliminated from contention before the halfway point -- and the success of any fantasy league is directly related to the level of participation you have.

The best setup, in my opinion, is 6 teams making the playoffs in a 10 team league. That way #1 and #2 get first round byes, which gives the top teams something to fight for once they are guaranteed a playoff spot.

Does a DNF count as a start? How about a DNS?

A DNF counts as a start. Dropping out because you're doing crappy shouldn't protect your owner from making the mistake of thinking that you didn't suck.

A DNS doesn't count as a start. If you DNS, then you recognized in advance that you aren't going to race at your full potential, so your owner should get whomever is ranked behind the DNS'ing skier.

Can players trade skiers between one another directly?

Not currently. There are a couple of reasons for this:

It prevents cheating. A player who has no chance of winning (or is just a bastard) can partake in vastly imbalanced trades where one player gets a valuable skier while giving up little of value. This sucks. Most fantasy leagues try to get around this by giving other owners the power to veto trades they deem unfair. This isn't implemented here because it would be a bunch more programming and is still fallible, since it gives bastard owners the ability to stop legit trades.
Forcing all player exchanges to go through the open market (sold to the highest bidder) makes holding a sizable wad of cash during the season a more interesting tactic.

Despite these reasons, trades may be added in the future.

Update: Players can now trade skiers. Go to someone's team, and click the "propose trade" button.

Is Marit Bjoergen really that good?

So I did this last winter, as a spreadsheet-based fantasy league with some friends. The eventual winner had Marit Bjoergen, and of the 10 skiers on his team, Marit Bjoergen scored 39% of his points. Marit Bjoegen had 1685 points that year -- the second closest was Katerina Neumanova, with 929. Bjoergen scored double the points of everyone racer except for two (Neumannova and Kuitunen).

So, yes. Marit Bjoergen is the best skier you can get, by far, assuming she stays healthy. If you don't win the auction for her, you better make sure whoever does has to pay an astronomical sum, or they will win. Don't say you weren't warned.

I think something is broken. Fix it!

Let me know what it is. I'm only 1 person, and I have a real job, but I'd really like everything to work so I'll try to fix it as soon as I can.

It would be great if this had feature X!

Yep, it probably would. Let me know what features would be useful in the future.

Who are you?

I am a programmer from Boston. I suck pretty hard at skiing these days, which is probably why I try to live vicariously through fantasy team domination.

I tried to look at a page and got some crazy message about 'max questions exceeded for user x.' What's that about?

Ah, yes, the joy of running this site on a $7.95/month web host. I'm only allowed 60,000 sql queries an hour, which is actually pretty easy to exceed, especially if you write sql as stupidly as I do. So it means the site will be down for an hour. Yes, this sucks. Let me know that it happened so I can try to figure out how much of a problem this is.

Marit Bjoergen isn't really that good, what the hell are you talking about?

Yeah, some of that hyperbole doesn't really apply, since this was originally written in 2005. Pretend I said Virpi Kuitunen... she should be going for a ridiculous sum next year.

This sounds like some complicated stuff. Did I just sign up for a market simulation? Tell me what to do.

Um, it can be kind of complicated, although just getting a bunch of skiers you like and hoping they kick ass is pretty enjoyable. In some ways, the best part is getting drunk and complaining loudly about whichever skier on your team is underperforming the most. Bonus points for suggesting EPO. But anyway, here's some basic tips for not totally screwing yourself over:

Bid on EVERY auction that comes up. Don't get lazy and say to yourself, "oh, Seriana Mishchol isn't very good, I don't want her." Every skier has a value greater than zero -- their auction is when you get to set that value. If you don't bid, you're inviting everyone else to get cheaper skiers -- how can that be good for you?
Balance your team. Women, Men, Sprinters, Distance skiers. The number of men that ski both disciplines well is a very small number. That number is shrinking on the women's side as well. To have a chance of winning each week you need skiers of both genders, that can sprint and ski distance, in both techniques. Paying a big sum for a classic sprint specialist feels good because of the star power, but think about how many classic sprints there actually are on the World Cup... Not as many as you think.
Budget your money over the course of the week. If you spend too much early, you won't have any money to bid prices up at the end of the week and other people will get better deals. If you don't spend much early, you could either be in position to take advantage of deals (because everyone else is running low on cash) or get in horrible bidding wars with other people who hoarded their money over the last few decent skiers. The safest strategy is spending money evenly; the riskiest is holding it until the end -- only takes one other person with a big budget to keep prices high, even if everyone else is broke.
Stop and think for a minute before bidding on any North Americans. They tend to go for more than they're worth because everyone wants to have their heroes on their fantasy team. Case in point: last year Kris Freeman went for $506 and scored 175 points, which ranked him 142nd/158 in the $$/points ratio. Not good.
Don't worry much about saving money for after the auctions, since everyone gets $1000 more.
Unlike ebay, bids aren't revealed until the auction ends. There's nothing to gain by making bids at the last second. If you're pressed for time, you can log in once a day and make all your bids -- you don't lose much by doing this.