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TdF STAGE PREDICTOR GAME: Stage 18

Everyone is welcome to play. Feel free to join in at any time and compete for stage wins, and for regular players the individual stage scores will accumulate for the hotly-contested overall competition, the casquette jaune.

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Prize & Trophies

We have a most excellent grand prize for the overall winner: a complete FSA cycling kit, including socks! Size is European Large, probably like a US Medium. If somebody petite or XL wins maybe some horse trading can be arranged. And thanks once again to holmovka for these awesome plaques and the non-virtual casquette jaune.

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Stage 17 Results

andrewp and Le Blaireau shared the stage win today, achieving exactly the same score with different sets of riders.

Stage 17 top 10:

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As in the race itself, vino2001 maintains a commanding lead in the overall, but there's a tight battle behind for the podium positions between trampie, andrewp and holmovka, separated by only 10 points.

Overall top 30:

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Excel spreadsheet download with complete results of all stages

Pdf download with complete results of recent stages

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Stage 18

Thursday 18th July

Published start time 12:20 CET

Gap - Alpe-d'Huez 172.5km

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Stage profile

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Cat 2 - Col de Manse
6.6km @6.2%
GPM 159km to go

Cat 3 - Rampe du Motty
2.4km @8%
GPM 127km to go

Cat 2 - Col d'Ornon
5.1km @6.7%
GPM 77km to go

HC - Alpe d'Huez 1
12.3km @8.4%
GPM 50km to go

Cat 2 - Col de Sarenne
3km @7.8%
GPM 41km to go

HC - Alpe d'Huez 2
13.8km @8.1%

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Useful links

TdF official site

Steephill TdF Live Dashboard

Cycling Fever startlist

Complete TdF Roadbook *HUGE* 135Mb zipped pdf

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Rules

In this game, only the stage results matter. You're not committed to keeping the same riders throughout the race, you make fresh picks before every stage. Our overall competition is just the sum of individual stage scores. You're eligible for the overall even if you miss some stages.

Pick 4 riders for the upcoming stage. The order of your picks doesn't matter. All of your riders can score.

Riders score points down to 10th place. Less popular riders score more points than heavily-picked favorites. See below for scoring details.

The strict entry deadline is the official start time of the stage, the neutralized rollout or Départ Fictif. Be warned - if your post is timestamped one minute late your entry won't count! So do remember that there's no disadvantage to getting an entry in early, even the day before, because you may always change your picks up until the deadline. Feel free to rethink your picks when it emerges which riders are more or less popular with other players. If you make changes, post your revised 4 picks in a reply to your original post.

Scoring

The top 10 finishers score points according to this basic scale from stage 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 according to the number of players that pick him. More popular means lower payoff. The highest possible payoff for a really unlikely outsider (picked by less than 5% of our players) is 100% of the scale above; the lowest possible payoff for a hot favorite (picked by more than 80% of our players) is 15% of the the scale above.

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For example, here's the result from the first stage of the Giro:

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If you're not familiar with this kind of scoring scheme from previous games, just play along for a few stages and it will soon make sense. All you need to do is pick 4 riders that you like for the stage - maybe go for two big favorites along with two less obvious riders that you fancy for a mid-top-10 placing.