to the second ever season of F1 Pools! Those of you who participated last year and have good long-term memories may skip skippety skip the rules and scroll straight into Round 1 duels if you wish. Unlike Max and his minions, I haven’t been stretching my game host muscles and done any tinkering with the rules during this post-Brazil hibernation period.
Game rules and miscellaneous rambling (mostly courtesy of my old friends copy & paste)
You know how F1 is supposed to be a team sport? Well, in that spirit, this competition is about team effort rather than individual drivers.
The game is vaguely based on footie (soccer) betting. In a nutshell: I pick team-vs-team duels (qualifying and race separately), you predict the outcomes and post your educated guesses in the appropriate game thread (such as this one for round 1) using the hopefully familiar 1X2 system where 1 = home win, X = draw and 2 = away win. The home team is the one that’s mentioned first.
Both reliability and pace need to be considered when rating a team’s performance in relation to its duel opponent according to the principles laid out below. Every car/driver combo that either sets a time in qualifying or finishes the race counts towards a duel outcome. Note: they should actually reach the chequered flag, simply being classified isn't enough. Also, in qualifying, they need to successfully complete both their timed laps as I’ll judge them by the aggregate times only. Another note: possible 10-place grid penalties don't apply here - I'm only interested in the times set, not the actual starting grid. Failures to set a qualifying time and/or finish the race can and will be used against a team - assuming their opponent fares any better in the reliability department.
The basic idea is that by picking "1" you're predicting a home team sweep. Logically "2" is then an away team sweep which leaves "X" for everything else. So far so simple. It gets a bit more complicated if and when people start falling off the track, blowing up their engines and what not, so here's a summary of how various race/qualifying results translate into duel outcomes (team A vs team B) :
1 the home team gets all its cars nicely lined up ahead of their opponents on the timesheets corresponds to finishing orders AABB, AAB, AB and just A, see item * below X a "draw": a mixed grid/split result/any deviation from the above (or below) i.e. finishing orders ABAB, BABA, ABBA, BAAB, ABA, BAB, ABB, BAA see item ** below 2 as in 1, but now it's the away team that does the winning* If you can’t beat them on track, you can still earn brownie points for reliability. To punish evil (joke!) one-car operations, a finishing order ABB (team A wins on pace, B on reliability) translates into an X because this is supposed to be a team sport and there are 2 cars in a team. However, an AB finish does not warrant a punishment for unreliability because team A hasn’t done any worse than team B in that respect (A wins on pace, no one on reliability, hence the outcome is a 1).
** No unreliabilty punishments for draws. An ABA result is an X and a mission accomplished for team B in that they’ve managed to beat one of their opponents on track.
Confused?
Never mind, that isn’t necessarily a handicap in this game. Besides, you can always ask for clarification, I’m more than happy to shed some light on the shadier rule peculiarities if need be.As for scoring, points will be awarded for every correct answer (bet you didn’t see that one coming!) and since this is a betting inspired game, guessing an unlikely outcome right is worth more than being right about something “dead cert”. Instead of some fancy calculating odds stuff, the mark distribution of your guesses is used as an indicator of probability so that for each correct guess, your score will be 1 + the fraction of players that guessed wrong. An example is probably in order: suppose 50 % of you have picked 1, 40 % X and the remaining 10 % 2. If 1 is the correct guess, the clever 50 % will score 1 + 0.5 = 1.5 points. Similarly, if X is the way to go, the score will be 1 + 0.6 =1.6 points etcetera. Points will be added up throughout the season and the person who by the end of the season has amassed the highest points total will get his/her name carved alongside the reigning champion dnbn's on the figurative F1 Pools Championship Trophy. Plus the eternal bragging rights that go with it.
That's about it. I think. Now all you need to do is participate en masse and I'll be one happy camper.
Here are the duels for round 1:
[B][SIZE=3]F1 Pools 2005, Round 1: Australian GP, Melbourne:[/SIZE] Qualifying duels: Race duels: [/B] 1 Ferrari - BAR 7 Ferrari - BAR 2 Renault - Williams 8 Renault - Williams 3 McLaren - Sauber 9 McLaren - Sauber 4 Red Bull - Toyota 10 Red Bull - Toyota 5 Jordan - Minardi 11 Jordan - Minardi 6 Ferrari - Renault 12 Ferrari - Renault
Deadline: anything that's posted and/or edited before the first qualifying session starts is OK.
The preferred format for the guesses is 122 XXX 12X XX1 but, basically, if it makes sense, it’s fine by me.
Good luck, everyone!
