Rio 2016 - Fantasy Olympics Game

All right! Congratulations to #Um, #Dois, #Tres, very well done.

And thanks for the fun to Skin Rip and Markr, for sure.

Yes - congrats to wheel158 and fbaezer, and thanks to Skin Rip.

Thanks, but count me out.

Thanks for keeping me right markr

Thanks for running this Skin Rip and congrats to Wheel158 and fbaezer.

Lots of fun.
I thought on behaving like a Mongolian coach, but no. Congrats to Wheel.
Thank you (and I DO know how hard it is to keep track of scores).

Nah, paralympics are a waaay different animal, a sort of griffin.
The most inspiring and some of the worst immaginable stories come out of those.

Thanks for tracking scores, Skin Rip and markr!

fbaezer, in my mind we tied for Gold, since there aren't tiebreakers in the real Olympics (except for overtime or shootouts in some team sports). It was pretty amazing and exciting that we tied with different country picks. Pretty cool, actually!

I actually like markr's idea of having weighted countries next time (where each country has a multiplier based on how they finished in the previous Olympics). I think that would make things extremely challenging. Perhaps we could run two different contests in parallel?

Good job to all!

Yes, thanks to all the heavy lifters so i can just sit on my copper colored laurels. My wife says I am too competitive, but I tell her I could do more.

This (I think) would be the team with the most points:

A. Great Britain, US Women
B. Japan, France, Italy
C. Brazil, Kenya, Jamaica, New Zealand, Kazakhstan
D. Croatia, Uzbekistan, South Africa, Azerbaijan and either Colombia or Serbia

This would be the team with the least points:

A. China Men, Australia
B. Belarus, Ukraine, Cuba
C. Norway, Rumania, Georgia, Slovakia and one of these three: Argentina, Thailand, Czech Republic
D. (Actual picks): Costa Rica, Chile, Latvia, Belize, Liechtenstein

Congrats to all of the winners, and thanks to Skin Rip for organizing and keeping score! My silence during the last two weeks here was not an indication of my lack of interest or enjoyment in the contest, which led me to become unusually interested in the (disappointing) performance of the Polish canoe and kayak teams.

I like the idea of running a "multiplier" contest in parallel with the current format for 2018. I saw a good format at https://en.zweeler.com/game/olympics/FantasyOlympics2016/home, which I would have played except that they don't allow entries from IP addresses in the US.

It was a great olympics. Looking forward to Tokyo.

That looks pretty cool. I like the idea of having a budget. I'm pretty certain they didn't base the values strictly on 2012 performance. When I calculated scores (using their 3/2/1 point system) for the 2012 games, they didn't always match up reasonably with the cost of the teams for the 2016 games.

I like the idea of a contest that doesn't split teams. That just makes it harder to manage. There are a number of sites that list the results in somewhat real-time in a table format that can easily be imported into a Google spreadsheet that can be shared for all to view. The sites that I'm aware of don't split the teams by gender. I wrote a python program to do that for me, but it would be so easy to create a spreadsheet that is accessible by all. It almost wouldn't need to be managed.

Or a certain female goalie...

They both like stripping, don't they?

Maybe you're thinking about Brandi Chastain (stripped down to sports bra). I was referring to Hope Solo's unsportsmanlike comments after being ousted in Rio.

Example of a contest where team costs are based on previous results and everybody has a budget (I still need to add budget cap checking). The site that tgordon92 referred to allowed a budget of $135 for a ten-country team with countries costing between $1 and $50.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14KaJFJxvrMkeYxLj1454FrR7V622uXdWDgMQVpNk_Wg/edit?usp=sharing

Tab 2016 shows how this Olympics would have turned out without the Group A picks (select 13 non-split teams without a budget cap). As you can see, the folks who spent more scored higher. Doing this and enforcing a budget cap should make the race much tighter from top to bottom (assuming people consume the vast majority of their budgets). I would break ties based on total cost of the teams (less money spent on a team wins ties).

Hopefully this link doesn't get yanked. It's a link to a Google spreadsheet I created.

There was a huge naked Hope Solo pictures leak, a few years ago.

Oh - I missed that.

markr, I really like this idea. My only suggestion is to go down to 5-cent increments to make things more fair at the bottom.

Really, this is a similar idea to the multiplier, just with a salary cap implementation instead. And $135 seems spot on. My team cost $135.2 (if you divide USA in half, $25 each).

Want to test things out with the next Winter Olympics? I think the salary cap might need to be smaller, since there are fewer events and teams, but not sure.