Running a ‘pick three’ competition

Hello,

Last year I started a fun little side competition during the grand tours, the 'pick three' competition which involved picking three riders from the home nation for a limited budget with the highest scoring team declared the winner.

There was interest in opening this competition up to include more tours such as the Tours of Britain, California, Down Under etc.  I'm happy for people to run this themselves as long as nobody goes overboard (I'm looking at you enrique).

Anyway, my spreadsheets from last year can be found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b4mptr1pp572xq1/n486LoprFS

The spreadsheets for the Tour of Britain and Vuelta will likely be the best to base any future game on as they are the latest iterations.

Basically you collate a list of riders from the forum, I did this in a 'player – rider 1, rider 2, rider 3' format then dump that into the 'Teams' tab, column A.  The spreadsheet will then separate out your riders.

Scoring wise, taking the Spaniards spreadsheet as an example, I prepared scores on each rest day copying the list of riders from the fantasy game and pasting them into the 'Rest Day X' tab.  You then update the score formula in the 'Teams' tab to point to the correct scores.  For example, look at cell D2 which has a formula =IFERROR(OFFSET(Final!$H$1,MATCH(C2,Final!$C$2:$C$380,0),0),0), that is pointing at the Final scores, changing Final to 'Rest Day 1' would revert back to the first Rest Day scores etc.

My rules for last year were pick three home nation riders for 50 credits, only riders who finish the race score points, highest total wins.  The reason only riders who finish the race were scored is because once a rider drops out they are removed from the roster in the game and are no longer included in the 'riders' list.

Some of the things to watch out for include poor spellings, complicated rider names that don't match the game (Costa/Faria Da Costa etc) and multiple surnames (Sanchez, Sanchez and Sanchez, lots of Rodriguez's and the Herrada's).

Any questions or problems, stick them in here and I'll try and help.