Barney, I'll update the rules for my two competitions to hopefully clarify a few things, you can copy and paste these when you start the thread for next season:
BoRed Cup
The rules of the BoRed Cup are very simple - everyone is welcome to participate - in fact, everyone who participates in the main competition automatically participates in this one, as the same entries count. The only difference is that for the Cup the person's average points per entry count, so even those who join late or miss a few entries along the way have a fair chance of winning it. However, to make sure no one wins it by making only a few very good entries, in order to be ranked in the Cup, you have to make at least half of the entries during the season. If two or more players are tied at the top at the end of the season, the player with the highest scoring single entry wins (and then second highest, etc.). And that's about it - I'll post the first standings six or seven games into the season, I don't think they'd make interesting reading any earlier.
The Premier League
The Premier League is an elite competition for twenty participants who earned their inclusion during the last season (newcomers may well be interested to read how they could qualify for next season's Premier League). The rules are as follows:
The 20 players will play each other (twice) over the length of the season. In each game, the winner will be awarded 3 points, the loser no points, while a draw would mean that both players get 1 point. The actual points collected by the prediction will count towards the "goal" difference. Only predictions for the Premier League games will count towards this competition.
If two players finish the season equal on points, their head-to-head score (including the away-goal rule) would decide their final positions (if still equal, goal difference, then goals scored).
At the end of the season, the bottom three players will be relegated. They will be joined by all those outside the bottom three who missed ten or more entries during the season. Their places in next year's competition will be taken by the highest ranked non-Premier League players in the main competition, provided they made at least 75% of all entries over the course of the season. If there aren’t enough newcomers satisfying this criterion to fill up the available places, the remaining places will be filled up according to the overall rankings, including the possibility that some of the relegated players are immediately reinstated.
Points for a game will be awarded based on the normal entries, but there will be a home advantage – home players will gain an extra point if their score prediction differs from the actual outcome by one goal. If a player's opponent doesn't post an entry, the player's own score will be compared to the minimum score of all away (if the player is at home) or home (if the player is away) players that did post for the PL fixture in order to determine if the player won, drew or lost the fixture. This minimum score will of course not count as the score of the player who missed an entry. A player who misses an entry will always get no points from the fixture. This minimum will also not count in any head-to-head games or goal difference if it proves to matter at the end of the season. In other words, using this minimum will only give the opponent some work to do, without rewarding the missing player in any way. If both players miss a fixture, it will count as a 0-0 draw as far as the goal difference is concerned, but neither player will be awarded a point for such a draw.
The actual fixtures for a given game will be determined randomly from the set of fixtures generated for the season (
https://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=349019.msg18389022#msg18389022).
To determine which set of fixtures is used on a given day, I'll be using the National Lottery draws to generate random numbers.
https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/results/lottery-drawsThe lottery draw will normally always take place well after our deadline has passed, and for Sunday games, I'll use the draw on Monday. I won't be using Thunderball, or any bonus balls, lucky stars, life balls, etc. I'll just take the regular draw, put the numbers in ascending order, concatenate them, and use the result as our random number, which I would then divide by the number of remaining games, keep only the rest, and add 1, which would give me the number of the round to be used.
