All Things Vital Downhill Fantasy

Nice, feels weird only having 7 riders instead of 15 like most rounds last year

So as per the podcast, the cuttoff is before any qualies this year/round right?

DH racing lured me in.

I've never done any sort of fantasy sport before and I'll never admit it to anyone in real life...but I think this is going to be fun as hell!

@sspomer  - is there a way to make the teams in a league visible before the results are posted? I have a league set up, but can't actually tell who is in it.

Is the scoring table accurate under How to Play? 

According to it, shouldn't I be receiving more pts for Amaury, Till, Gloria and Valentina?

(oh geez, company won't let me upload images, afraid I might steal IP). Anyway, check your scores against the scoring table in the rules, everybody!)

Sitting P4 right now might be the single greatest athletic achievement of my life, I would like to thank Vital for this opportunity to stunt on y'all

Gotta say. I don’t know if i love this style of fantasy. Without limiting the number of riders you can put on your roster, it feels more like a math game than picking who you really believe in. That said I’m still glad it exists and will continue to nerd out on the math. 

Wouldn't it be more of a 'math game' and not luck based if there were... Less riders? With more riders you have more chances to succeed, as well as more chances to fail. Overall it increases variety.

And that's made clear when first place dude had 16 riders and the dudes just below him had rosters of 12 and 11. With some people picking race winners and others avoiding winners and stacking mid range riders.

No math can account for falls and flats, rather abundant this round. If you picked Rosa Marie Jensen because she qualified 2nd and was the most valued junior girl, you were rewarded with a 5th place and almost certainly less than a point per 1k spent thusly.

Meanwhile if you were savvy enough to follow Aletha's progress and runs, and weren't unnerved by her 8th place qualifier... You were rewarded with a 1st place finish. Mathematically, if you took her qualifier at face value, you're absolutely not spending that much on a potential 8th place finisher.

So then if you cared enough you'd have to check EVERY timed training run of hers to see if all her splits were better and only her qualifying was bad... And then after all that she could still get a flat and end up in last.

I think if there was any way to prove its a 'math game' it would be a significant portion of players having the same roster and being the same placing (likely near the top). And we don't see that at all. Honestly the top 5-10 rosters are so mixed up and diverse I've tried to study them to increase strategy but there's no way to... Strategize an extra bit of luck.

Once you get past the 'avoid expensive picks who aren't winning and don't buy cheap riders just cuz they're cheap' concept, it's a pure roll of the dice.

1st and 2nd place shared 10 riders, while having a 16 and 12 rider roster. So 6 and 2 unique picks not being shared... And they only ended up one point apart.

Oh, also nobody has ever picked the best possible team in Vital Fantasy (to my knowledge). I'm not sure who came closest, but due to the budget... Nobody has ever made a perfect team on Vital Fantasy.

Bringing up who has came closest brought out the spreadsheet geek in me. 

The closest to a perfect team had a 43 point difference with 1408 of a possible 1451 at Lake Placid in 2025. Second place goes to sideshowmel42 with a 68 point difference getting 1024 of a possible 1092 at South Korea this weekend. Third place with a 125 point difference got 1696 of a possible 1821 from the Loudenville race in 2024. I can't find who the Fantasy winners were in any year other than 2026 to give them credit.

Well, the points mismatch between what Vital was expecting (250 vs 200 for P1 Elite Mens) didn't help things, so the junior classes (points unchanged) had an oversized impact on the results. Only seven of the top 20 highest points per dollar in finals were in the elite categories which I expect will change in the next round with the shakeup in rider costs. With that said, the points earned in finals are the same as last year, I checked the rule book on Friday and the scoring was black meaning it wasn't changed for the 26 rulebook.

Regardless of the points earned in elite, the costs of top riders definitely was higher than previous years, with multiple riders in elites priced >$300k meaning that even if they won the race and picked up 250 points they still wouldn't be great value picks.

I think overall, I'd like to see top tier riders priced lower so that picking the elite race winners is a boost for your team (Asa & Vali were 24th & 27th, respectively in pts/$) and if we're awarding 200 pts for P1 in elite finals, the elite / junior fields should be rebalanced accordingly (6 junior women - over half the field - in the top 20 pts/$ doesn't feel right).

Ultimately this style fantasy game is and always has been a math game - it's an expected value problem with some human added randomness. With that said, I think repricing riders so that picking multiple race winners on a weekend is essential to having the top team (this weeks winner had zero).

Again. Second place fantasy finisher has Asa and Aletha... And only a 12 rider roster. And was ONE point away from first place (who picked 16 riders and 0 winners).

THAT'S the beauty of Vital Fantasy. Best possible team picked junior winners and not elite winners, BUT that's still kinda expected because picking Asa and Vali and having it be a "safe bet" probably isn't the best for a fantasy system. Let me just pick the top riders and use it as a free win button.

And best possible team picked 16 and the winning player picked 16, despite having 5 different riders.

Truly you can only pick mathematically 'likely' riders and then start praying to your preferred God(s)... Nothing math-centric about it. At least, no math helped me avoid Jordan Williams with a solid qualifying and then a flat in finals. Nor me deciding to avoid Aletha because I thought she struggled on the new track, and then she made a proper fool of me lol.

You can pick Asa and Aletha and some others and earn 1023 points... Or you can pick neither and have a bunch of economical picks earn you 1024.

if SideShowMel's Antoine pick places 13th instead of 12th... ProHillBilly is the winner. That sounds like a fair and engaging fantasy system to me.

"With that said, the points earned in finals are the same as last year, I checked the rule book on Friday and the scoring was black meaning it wasn't changed for the 26 rulebook." 

They actually only highlighted the HEADING of that section in red for the 2026 amendments, which understandably threw some people off (historically they have indeed highlighted the whole table in red whenever they changed anything in the points structure, but for some reason they didn't do that this year). The points have definitely been changed though, it was 250 for a win in 2025 and it's 200 now in 2026.

Well that threw me for a loop. The UCI website shows 200 Points for the Lake placid winner but Vital's embedded PDFs from the race show 250 Points. I guess you can't trust the Swiss.

It was 200 for a w last year, final round is 250. Jackson’s points from the Uci rankings. It is confusing that the placid results show 250 though.LMS only got 200 points in the rankings for his win