Padsbets Fantasy Cycling

Oh my gosh what am I doing? You'll have to do endless excel work in your free time!

This thought crossed my mind as I was adjusting my database and building out an excel spreadsheet to enable a fantasy cycling league administered by my good self...

But despite this I am proposing the following, an auction based fantasy cycling competition based around a points system tweaked slightly from PCS and consisting of all 2.1 and higher races from across the globe for the whole season. The difference between PCS's rankings and mine are I have amalgamated WT one day race points for simplicity, downgraded lower places in 1.1 one day races and lowered the worlds TT points as I think they are over stated.

The league will be H2H with a fixture list drawn up randomly by me, I have split up the season into 46 race "weeks" and therefore we will need 24 teams. However if there is less interest then I will adjust to the number of entrants much like the scottish football divisions.

This doc HERE has the season schedule and my points system.


There will be rounds of auctions before the season starts where sealed bids will be submitted for your chosen riders and the highest bid will get the rider. There will be a budget of 100 and your team will not be allowed to go over this budget in the pre season auction rounds. When submitting your bids you will assign a preference order so if you win too many bids and your team goes over budget or number of riders this is how the riders you end up with will be determined.

Before the first deadline, I will randomly assign each team a number between 1 and 24. This will determine which team will win the auction for a player if there are two bids that tie for the highest amount. The lower of the two numbers will win. After each round, the order will reverse, i.e. the team that was assigned 24 at the start will become 1 for the 2nd round of bidding, and team 1 at the start will become team 24.

The minimum bid is $0. If you bid $0 for a player, if no other team makes a bid for that player, you will win the auction and get the player for free.

Bids can be made in increments of 0.1. So, a bid of $4.5 or $4.6 would be acceptable, but a bid of $4.55 is not.

There will be 5 transfer windows through the season at crucial stages (marked in yellow on the googledoc), the mechanics of which I will detail later once teams are established.

I am proposing 24 teams of 12 riders each, £10 entry with prizes for League places 1 (£100), 2 (£40), 3 (£20), an overall season long prize in terms of highest score of £50 and a TDF winner prize of £30.

I will have a team of my own in this league and will operate the auctions through a segregated email address so I won't see your bids before the deadline and I will submit my bids to a neutral party on the deadline or just to twitter itself so you know I'm not putting all this effort in to win £100... If I do win one of the prizes I'll give it to one of the blog charities anyway.

Thanks for reading and if your interested in taking part or have questions contact me on twitter.

Review of 2014

Inspired by @EddyGecko's review of his badminton year, I thought I would do the same with my 2014 gambling on cycling with all the highs and lows it brings.

Now I only started actually writing a blog in late July which only gives results for the last third of the cycling road season so I will talk about a mix of the blog bets which are all on the googledocs sheet linked on the right hand side and pre blog bets, which 90% of which will be on my twitter (whether or not you want to trawl through all my tweets is debatable though...). In my experience it is imperative to record your bets so that you can have an idea of what your good at and what needs work on, or if you follow the various tipsters about, who is good and who is not.

Initially lets look at the big numbers and then drill down into detail. From late July through the blog I posted up 240 bets in various cycling markets staking 228.2 units with a p/l of +64.28 units which I was really pleased with for such a short period of time. Obviously looking at the spreadsheet you can see that this was largely derived from just a few of those 240 bets but like backing Golf, in cycling there are 200 riders a race and there will be dark periods but keeping the faith eventually paid off.

Now lets look at the full year statistics by bet type. Over the course of the season there are plenty of different bets available, especially during the Grand Tours which is why there are so many options here. I also split out TT and TTT's as for me the race against the clock is a different proposition to a normal stage race.

From the above table its pretty clear where I did well, stage win and each way picks gave me over 75% of my annual profits, which is good as its the most readily available market to bet on.

Particular highlights from the stage win bets were...

Pauline Ferrand Prevot winning the Worlds Road Race at 33/1! such a shame this is basically the only women's race all year you can bet on. I'm going to try and include videos for these as they were such happy moments!

Next up in my personal hall of famers for the year was the much maligned Ben Swift proving that he has a lot more ability than a lot of people give him credit for when he sweeped up a 300/1 (inplay about 15 mins from the end) e/w placing in Milan San Remo. I still think he had the speed to win if his positioning was better, watch him on the left hand side of the road in the sprint.

Anyway those two were my favourite bets of the year, but returning to that table one area which was really disappointing was H2H bets (backing one rider to be classified higher than the other), I put a lot of effort into these over the year for a 0.9% return. To improve on this I'm looking to try and only pick out the really wrong odds and not the more marginal picks, sounds easy but I doubt it will be. 

My best races of the year were the World Championships, Paris Nice, The Three Days of De Panne, and Milan San Remo, with the worst race being the Vuelta where I shipped 30 units, Catalunya was nearly as grim also. I tried to make a nice graph by event but ultimately could not make it intelligible!

And now for the big category that I just had to include is the one that got away. Dario Cataldo stage 14 of the Giro 33/1. Watch the sky man's legs just stop in the sprint v Battaglin, if it looks slow its because it was on cobbles half way up a mountain. This video doesn't do it justice though, Cataldo was always going to beat the Colombian Pantano and Battaglin only caught them up just before this video starts. A great stage though even if I was close to shedding a tear for my P/L graph.

Next year hopefully I can match this year and try and improve on those H2H's! I'm also working on a database which might give me some nice graphs to include on here but that will be dependent on my time commitments. I'll be blogging everything I can but do follow on twitter as that's where inplay and late additional bets will go. If I get decent results then I will want the odd small donation to the charities on here as that was the point in the first place. Have a good xmas and new year and I'll see you for whatever race the bookies put up first from down under in January.