Fantasy Cycling – Tour Down Under

Let’s get straight into it, as we don’t have much time.  The game only opened this week and the race starts Tuesday.  I’ll just post the basics for this article.

The fantasy cycling game we play is run by english media outlet road.cc.  The game runs all year but players can just play one event or continue, it is up to you.  The game is free to play.  There is a premium option which gets access to more competitions, although the game is playable and fun without the premium option.  The link to the game is

http://fantasy.road.cc/home

The code for the DTTalk ProCycling League is 75482, this is a private league but any number of players can ask to join.

Prizes

I’ll get back to you on this.  I don’t think they have announced these yet.  The TDU is the first major cycling event for the year.  Because the fantasy comp is managed from England they treat the TDU as a bit of a warm up event for the bigger events later in the year in the European summer.  It takes a few days before they release all the information.

Changes from Last Year

There are some big changes to trading this year.  For TDU we have a max of 12 trades over the whole event; we can use these whenever we want.  The key fantasy numbers for the TDU are in the table below –

Last year there were 2 trades allocated per stage, plus we could “buy” extra trades for 10 penalty points taken from our score.  With the removal of penalty trades I think we are a bit more vulnerable to rider injury withdrawals late in the race than previously.  Although this is going to be a bigger issue in the big 3 week tours, than the 6 day TDU.

How to Play

Using a salary cap of 140 credits, you pick a team of 8 riders.  You riders will score points if they do any of the following things –

The full game instructions can be found here

http://fantasy.road.cc/howto

Tour Down Under stages and race information

For more information on the Tour Down Under race and stages go to this link

http://www.tourdownunder.com.au/the-race/tour-details/stages

There is also a race tracker app for your mobile so you can keep track of your riders in the race.

http://thetourtracker.com/tour-down-under-race-coverage/

ProCyclingStats.com is the best site to research the abilities and historic performance of various riders in the TDU startlist.  Just click on any riders name and you will see their performance history.

That’s it for now.  Register with road.cc, join the game and start planning your team.

I’m on my way to Adelaide tomorrow to provide race-side expert fantasy cycling commentary for the whole week.  I will post a team picking strategy article over the weekend.

If you have any questions or comments post in the comments below, or contact me on twitter @NixTrader