Cycling

#CouchPeloton

The #CouchPeloton is a twitter community that follows various forms of cycling racing. During Grand Tours (and occasionally other races telecast by SBS in Australia) they play games associated with the races via twitter. Angelic Scootus usually organises the games but you can also keep an eye on the hash tags for details. Participation is open to anyone on twitter.

#FRATL

The most popular game is #FRATL where participants try to guess the time (Australian Eastern Standard/Daylight Time) that the first rider will cross the finish line. Guesses must be submitted by a certain distance before the finish which will be announced beforehand taking into account the TV coverage.

#TrollTips

The other major game is #TrollTips. Originally participants would pick a rider to beat "the troll" (a rider selected by the person running the game), but it has gradually morphed into a game where you try to pick the winner of the stage/race. Again tips must be submitted by twitter before a certain distance from the end of the stage. Typically #trolltips uses a time based deadline so if you aren't in south eastern Australia make sure you account for any time zone differences.

#8Nations/#6Nations

Prior to the 2022 Tour de France Katherine Bates retweeted a question

WHAT IF... You could build the best possible cycling team with only riders on #TDF2022 startlist? What would be your 8-man All-Star team? ONLY ONE RULE : your riders must be from 8 different nationalities!

@cyclingwhatifs

This seemed like an interesting challenge and thanks to Rhonda Gwyther for the name #8NationsTDF was born. As per the quote the competition involves picking a team from the competitors for an event where each rider is from a different country. The number of riders in a team is the same as the number of riders in each team for the actual race, with no replacements once the race has started. Your team scores points based on the first 10 finishers for each stage so unlike a real team there is no need for domestiques to keep your GC contenders safe but you need a mix of riders that will finish in the top 10 of at least some stages (although a team of sprinters probably won't work well if there are also mountainous stages).
As all the work (for the participants) is done before the start of the event missing a night on the #CouchPeloton won't matter to a participant's overall score.
The game continued as #6NationsTDFF for the women's Tour de France (only 6 women in a team compared to 8 for the men's version of the tour). Versions of La Vuelta a España will probably run with a variant of the hash tag (to be determined).

Scoring

Each of the games use the same basic scoring system. 20 points for the guessing the winning rider/time, 16 for second, 13 for third, 10 for fourth, 8 for fifth, 6 for sixth and then 4-3-2-1 for places 7th to 10th. For #FRATL "second" is the next closest gap to the winning time (typically +/- one minute away from the winning time, rather than the time of the second rider. #TrollTips also provides bonus points if you select a rider that less than 4 others pick to try to encourage some diversity of picks.
At the end of the Tour the player with the most points is the winner and can bask in the glory until the next race.