fantasy giro d'italia time!!
 

hay everyone...it's fantasy giro time! hibernation is over! first grand tour of the year and high time
to show how much or little you know or luck into.

https://www.velogames.com

league name: bike forums
league code: 553021363111

deadline to enter is 12:00 cest (central european summer time) on friday, may 5th.

let's do this.

Way too complex for this old codger.

picking 9 riders and a team name is too complex? the site does all the heavy lifting and numbers crunching. ah well, hopefully we'll see you for the tour.

It sounded like I had to deal with salaries and all. I'ii look at it again. I have zero experience with fantasy sports. And I have never ubdetstood the draw.

In looking forward to this Giro looks like teams are treating this as the premier Gran Tour this year. Let the Hundred Year celebration of the Corsa Rosa and the fight for the endless trophy begin!

last day to register! love the spring classics but my heart lies with the gt's.

I have added myself!

disappointed at the giro turnout this year but we'll forge ahead. funny how we all picked yates for our team.
curious to see if my two sprinter approach yields enough points in the first two weeks vs adding another gc/climber
rider like a mollema, landa, tj or pozzovivo. if valverde, sagan or gva had been riding, woulda picked them for sure with
a few punchy uphill finishes on the docket. rohan dennis is my wild-card/do everything guy being able to climb, tt
and contest those short uphill sprints.

Darn...missed out on getting my picks in. Will pay more attention for the TdF. Great stages so far...today was a real barn burner!

And then there were 5.

Just arrived in the league with team "Eh, for true?" nipping on your heels in second place, ooga-booga.

Still sticking with the Yates motif, pondering many last minute flips, and glad that giving Zakarin a second chance to let me down is so exciting already.

I don't come to bikeforums any more, but had to check in with my old nemesises, er, nemesii, or is it nemesissies?

nemeses, i think. bummed about rohan dennis because he lost the most today. was thinking he would be a dark horse top 10 gc guy along with 2 potential tt wins and/or a rolling/punchy finish stage. now just hoping he can start tues. the rest day comes at a good time for him. jungels and quick-step sure did a number today, eh?

"Like Belgians on a cross-wind" isn't quite the idiom that "like Chinese on rice" is, but it should be close.

I've done a lot of careful follow on analysis and I've concluded that you're going down, ooga-booga. Ha ha ha.

Here's to another great grand tour and our little fight for faux fantasy pink. Everybody have fun! And talk a little smack.

slcbob...you're the only other person dumb enuff to take (the same) two
sprinters as me. i mean who uses their wild card choice on a sprinter (other than
sagan)?!?! just stoopid.

and i like your "belgians on a cross-wind" line. so true.

And with a Zakarin on top for a real triple threat of indefensible ambition in fantasy play. It's in the subtle nuances of my minion selection where I must break you. Though counting on Nibali to vanish has helped (Vuelta) and hurt (Giro) me in the past, so it will be a nail biter.

It could be worse for both of us. We could have vanGarderen and Rolland on the same team like Gallo, ha ha.

Nothing leaps out as ridiculous on Eddie Pliers' team, except it seems to have the potential for the same anti-synergy he is famous for where the whole is so much worse than the sum of its parts. Pinot may fit right in.

We'll see what the Crushers can do once they start the race. They may not have gotten the memo about the Friday start.

:roflmao: :roflmao2: :troll:

Etna on stage 4, Mortirolo two tries up Stelvio stage 16, Grappa stage 20 yea I loaded up on climbers and still have the Gorilla! Big blow to BMC with Dennis hate to see that

With that approach I'm surprised you could resist Zakarin and Pinot, but maybe they haven't choked enough to be the dark horses you plan to ride to dominance. ;)

pinot is dead to me. he could the next 5 gt's in a row and
i still wouldn't pick him. ended up choosing him a while back
for a fantasy gt (may have been the vuelta) before he revealed
he had a serious case of the descending yips. grumpy about
the bad luck for rohan dennis (was thinking he'd have 550-900
points), zakarin showed his metttle, worried that jungels is peaking too soon and praying for both sprinters to make it to milano.

yeah...tvg and rolland. talk about mercurial. starting
to feel that way about pozzavivo. just throw in talansky
and it's a woulda coulda shoulda mushpot.

Don't forget Tyler Farrar.

I've ridden the fantasy game roller coaster with all those guys. Way back to Dennis Menchov.

The climbers are the most mercurial but high hopes and low scores can be found in any category.

Pity about Dennis but it's not like his teammate Teuns is doing anything for me to close the gap on you, even if he is still in the race. I'm counting on my cheap Movistar unclassified dudes to start racking up some Nairo assist points soon. Or maybe Winner will winner up on his own. I had a brief flash of hope on Etna. Just like Rolland's guys! Ha ha ha.

the last few km's on this upcoming stage 6 look to be a doozy. punchy uphill finish along
with supposedly a few hairpin turns and rollers enrollee to said punchy uphill finish. hoping nibbles
gives it the gas but hoping more that there aren't any race-changing crashes/injuries because of the ending
km's. dunno how wide the applicable thoroughfares are but i think we're gonna see some fireworks good or
bad or maybe both.

your killing me literally Zakarin was a consideration but I went another route. So far not a great decision. I built around the Shark, the Gorilla, Yates and Dumoulin

Pinot was not on my radar but I like him as a rider but think he is better suited to the TdF.

Went with Rolland because I thought he might shine in the steeps and was good value TdF does not have the same type of grades

TJ was a value pick that fit points wise He is a good rider losing Dennis is not good for him

ooga always seems to do well with lower picks and I do not. so for 8 points I picked up De Buyst and De Plus because I did not know which way my team was going :thumb:

So far it looks like the sprinter strategy is working out well

it is. currently ranked 34th out of 17,225. pinch me. pretty much nowhere to go but down and down hard.
for the sprinter thing to work tho, i (and every other dope doing likewise) need both their sprinters to place
in the top 5 of all sprint stages, pick up occasional incidental sprinting points throughout the stage, get
occasional incidental assist points when teammates win a stage and finish the entire race to get bonus points in the points
competition. that's a lot of if's. we all know how much sprinters love the mountains and the last week of the giro,
fortunately, the tour of california has come onto the scene and it seems like there is less sprinter (and rouleur)
abandonment halfway or 2/3 of the way in. teams now have a viable alternative based on team/riders goals.

speaking of the tour of california, the fantasy page should be up for that at any moment so i'll post a separate
thread for that. the initial fear when the race got moved to may to overlap the giro was that the toc would be
a lesser/afterthought race. it has really turned out to be anything but. i love the giro but really, who wants to race
3 weeks in the rain and cold (and occasional snow)?

and another random thought...when was the last time quick-step had a viable general classification gt contender?
virenque is the last one that comes to mind. not that he was a great all-around rider but his mountain escapades
occasionally found him in the final top ten. jungels better watch himself. sailing into uncharted waters....

I think it's Jungels keeping you in clover, ooga-booga.

It's always weird to pick. You have to have at least one sprinter, and there's rarely a dirt cheap one so the big winners aren't that much more expensive.

You can only afford a few good GC guys. You can do well the first few days without them (who cares, other than some trash talking which is just setting you up for a fall), but you can't do well in the long haul.

Those climbers are so mercurial as to how they really do on points. Even the mountain jersey winner sometimes barely cracks the top 30 scorers or so in the long haul. So really the good "climber" picks are the GC-ish dudes who are classified as climbers for whatever reason George has.

The art of this thing really is in picking your UNCLASSIFIED guys with precision and foresight (and LUCK!!!) and then making the right call on the GC/Sprint names (a few top names, or a few more slightly less top) -- e.g. do I do better with 1 & 10 overall, or 3, 4, and 6th.

And then the race starts and it all goes to hell!

P.S. 34th is awesome.

A pity YOU'RE GOING DOWN. ;)