All welcome to play
E3 Harelbeke is the 5th race of the Classics Predictor Game, similar in concept to our GT stage predictor game. There's no commitment to a season-long team of riders here. Instead, you pick 4 riders that you like for each spring classic, one race at a time. There's a season leaderboard for 13 spring cobbled & hilly classics through to Liege-Bastogne-Liege, but you're also welcome to play for any standalone race.
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This is all you need to know to play
Pick 4 riders that you like for this race and post them in a comment below, the order doesn't matter. Riders score points down to 10th place. Less obvious riders are worth considering: if they get a decent top-10 result, they can score more points in this game than a big-name favorite.
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Strict entry deadline: Friday 13:00 CET
The deadline is about 40km into the race, before the first helling (Leberg). If you enter after the race starts you can't pick anyone in a break, or any rider ahead of the last major group in a fragmented peloton. Earlier entrants are not disadvantaged - you're free to change your picks until the entry deadline. Do this in a reply to your original entry.
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RESULTS
There were no shortage of players with the top two in today's race, but holmovka and StuC made the difference by adding points for Thomas in 4th place, and they share the win.
There was no major change in the overall, still led by Saltire, but both rmeloa and Ed K scored well with 3 picks in the top 10 to narrow the deficit. Here are the top 30:
Excel spreadsheet of all results
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Scoring rules
All 4 of your riders can score.
The top 10 finishers score points according to this basic scale from race winner down to 10th place:
100-60-50-40-30-25-20-15-10-5
However, if riders of all abilities scored the same, we'd all just be picking the big favorites all the time. So we multiply the scale above by a rider's payoff percentage based on the number of players that pick him. More picks, lower payoff.
If you're not familiar with this kind of scoring scheme from the Giro & TdF Stage Predictor games last year, just play along for a couple of races and it will soon make sense. All you need to do is pick the 4 riders that you like for the race. A good strategy might be to go for two big names and two outsiders that you fancy for a breakout result.