After a rainout on Céilidh weekend, this past Sunday was designated as our official fantasy buggy showdown. 41 people entered our first ever fantasy buggy game to take their shot at the $250 “ticket to carnival” grand prize sponsored by NumberFire.com. Fringe and CIA timers helped out to collect times that could be shared publicly so we also got some of our best data so far of the season.
Jake Mohin (SigEp mechanic, ’10) outfoxed everyone else, taking home the grand prize with a total time of 550.2. He made the best of his inside info, picking SigEp as a backhill team while the rest of the top 5 picks had them for the freeroll. Jake adds,
“I knew our chairman was pushing pretty hard for our guys to make a strong showing in terms of pushing so I made a gamble and left us off the free rolls list to give us the #1 Back hills. In terms of roll number, I banked on 3rd free roll always being fastest. Pushers are usually slow on third first run from being sleepy, fast on their second push, and exhausted on their third.”
There were a number of surprises on the weekend that may have affected the results. KapSig and SN haven’t made it back out, so we only had 7 teams. Because it ended up happening after daylight savings time, most teams got 5 rolls, but we had restricted it to the first 3. For what it’s worth 14 of the top 20 overall times were in rolls 1-3. Picking the right Spirit roll was probably critical as Fuko wasn’t out, Haraka never finished a roll, and Seraph. I was surprised to see that the winning strategy was to pick most of the fastest teams for the downhill as I thought the spread on the backhills would be larger. I guess pushers were giving it their all across the board.
Top Fantasy Buggy Picks
| Name | Freeroll Picks | Backhills Picks | Total Time | Prize | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Jake Mohin | Bonsai-3 Bane-3 Ascension-3 Haraka-3 |
Barracuda-2 Kamikaze-3 Apache-3 DeltaForce-3 |
550.2 sec | $250! |
| 2nd | James Solomon | Bonsai-1 Bane-2 Mapambazuko-1 Barracuda-2 |
DeltaForce-2 Apache-1 Kamikaze-1 Ascension-2 |
555.4 | “Good work!” |
| 3rd | Janice Weinberg | Bonsai-3 Bane-3 Barracuda-2 Seraph-2 |
Freyja-2 Apache-2 Kamikaze-2 DeltaForce-2 |
559.1 | “Nicely done!” |
Full data
Of course, if you’re not in the top 3, you still want to know how your picks turned out. Visit the fantasy buggy results page for the details:
http://cmubuggy.org/fantasy/results
Winning Real Buggy Times
Of course, we also care about real buggy around here, and once the fantasies are dealt with, it turns out SDC, Fringe, and SigEp are running pretty close and pretty darn quick for November. Fringe had the fastest downhill at 52.4 which was a couple of seconds slower than their freeroll on raceday last year. SDC and SigEp tied for the fastest backhills at 56.07 with Fringe a half second back. SDC put together the fastest combination of the day, finishing in 1:49.20. That’s almost 3 seconds slower than their win on mini-raceday last year, but this may not have gotten the full mini-raceday energy since there are still 2 weekends of rolls left if the weather holds up.
Downhill (Hill 2 –> Window 0)
| Org | Buggy | Driver | Time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Fringe | Bonsai | Becky Peterkin | 52.40 |
| 2nd | SDC | Bane | Melisa Yepes | 53.14 |
| 3rd | Fringe | Bonsai | Becky Peterkin | 53.36 |
BackHills (Window 0 –> Finish)
| Org | Buggy | Driver | Time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | SDC | Bane | Melisa Yepes | 56.07 |
| 1st | SigEp | Barracuda | Silvia Manolache | 56.07 |
| 3rd | Fringe | Bonsai | Becky Peterkin | 56.54 |
Course (Hill 2 –> Finish)
| Org | Buggy | Driver | Time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | SDC | Bane | Melisa Yepes | 109.20 |
| 2nd | Fringe | Bonsai | Becky Peterkin | 109.90 |
| 3rd | SigEp | Barracuda | Silvia Manolache | 110.57 |
Feel free to share any additional analyses you do of all this cool data. Also definitely leave any suggestions you’ve got for improvements for next time. Thanks for playing!
tommyk says:
any idea what the optimal picks would have been?
DeVos says:
My quick stab at optimal picks:
AEPi-Kamikaze-1 Backhills: 69.11
CIA-Ascension-1 Backhills: 61.85
DF-(Perun)-2 Backhills: 74.2
Fringe-Bonsai-1 Freeroll: 52.4
KapSig-Apache-X Freeroll: 84.98
SDC-Bane-2 Freeroll: 53.14
SigEp-Barracuda-2 Backhills: 56.07
Spirit-Mapambazuko-1 Freeroll: 60.5
Total time: 512.25
(This assumes you use rolls 1-3 only. If you take into account rolls 4&5 the only change is DF’s backhills decrease by 1 second.)
Jake says:
A huge thanks to Sam, Nik, and Anthony for organizing this whole thing.
It’s a really cool idea; I hope we can do a bigger/badder version for carnival! I think it will draw people on.
I’d love to say I had a strategy other than “pick teams I know are fast” but I really just based most of my decisions on free roll times from this semester and last carnival. The push teams were picked by favoritism / noticing that sigep’s new guys are quick.
Hauser says:
Have the deductions for women’s push teams been taken into account? The only team I know for sure is CIA, but Ascension 2 had women’s backhills (and, irrelevantly, Freyja 5 had a women’s freeroll).
Sam Swift says:
Unfortunately, push team gender wasn’t systematically recorded by anyone on Sunday. We considered trying to piece the data together after the fact, but decided that it would be less consistent and thus less fair than leaving that variable out. Piecing it together is especially hard because all the pushers need to be female for the roll to count as female, so seeing a picture or having a report of one female pusher on a certain roll isn’t enough.
Hauser says:
I was having the same problem myself, so I was curious if you had the answer. Thanks, though!