2026 Women's CQ Manager game

[Armchair Cyclist]

So, here we go with the 4th edition of the Women's version of the famous CQ game. Who will join Rufs*, Bminchow and Ruvu (*: first edition would have been won by DJW if the same rules had applied that year as since) as holders of the presigious, coveted, and imaginary trophy?

It could, as the lottery have taught us, be you: all you need to do is choose 16 women riders, who between them scored 4000 points or fewer (my wife despairs of me if I say 'less') during 2025. The final points tally for 2025 is not published yet, but for all but the most eclectic of selections the prices will be their points in the download dated 8th November here, or found in the table here.

A slight difference from the main game that Skidmark runs: I do not impose any restrictions on the prices of returning riders from a suspension (I can't think off the top of my head of any likely cases anyway). The game runs for the full season (so technically I am premature in listing Ruvu as the 2025 winner in the first paragraph), but don't be surprised if I don't pay much attention to it after mid-October. I won't set any ambition of weekly updates as Skidmark does, but if it goes more than three weeks, feel free to prompt me.

Other than that, the main piece of info you'll need is the closing date for entries: send your teams to me by PM by the start of the Australian Elite Women's race on 11th January (so those in Europe and the US will probably need to do so on 10th). The farther in advance you send me your team, the more chance you will have to make adjustments if I uncover an error in your calculations. If I haven't sent you an acknowledgement within 24 hours, by all means send a note to make sure it arrived.

You will help me greatly if you can make sure that you submit the names in the same version as CQ use. It's also handier if you don't put anything else on the same line: I don't need their ages, teams or 2025 prices, and would only have to manually delete such before it goes in the spreadsheet.

Thanks in advance for entering, good luck to the riders you select, and enjoy the game (as I will almost certainly say in the confirmation PMs, unless I get an uncharacteristic burst of originality).

By all means tell others and let's increase the participation here: we are typically high 20s in terms of players, but the more the merrier.

And if your post-Christmas, pre-New Year decision making season is not already overloaded with this, the men's equivalent, and the Emerging Women's Game, I would expect to have the three year Emerging Men's game up by the end of the day (edit: not until early hours of the following day, but here it is)

 

[RedheadDane]

Quick question:
Have you considered raising the team size and budget?

Not for this edition of the game of course. I already made my team...

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

As far as I recall, my thinking was to have an average spend per rider in line with that of the main game, (it is 250 as opposed to 227, so in the same ballpark) but I thought that with fewer likely players being very familiar with the women's peloton in depth, smaller team size would be less intimidating.
As ever, I am happy to hear proposals and reasons: this game doesn't have a whole area of study around it's history as the men's game does that demands consistency for comparison.

 

[RedheadDane]

TBF, my main reason is that it seems a little strange - to me - that the Developing Women Game has a bigger team size than this game.
Surely, if people can find 18 women with a life-time score of 199 or less, then finding - say, between 20 and 25 - riders with a combined score in the previous season of... some number... shouldn't be that complicated.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

TBF, my main reason is that it seems a little strange - to me - that the Developing Women Game has a bigger team size than this game.
Surely, if people can find 18 women with a life-time score of 199 or less, then finding - say, between 20 and 25 - riders with a combined score in the previous season of... some number... shouldn't be that complicated.

What someone else would do two years later wasn't really a consideration when I started this game...

 

[RedheadDane]

What someone else would do two years later wasn't really a consideration when I started this game...

Of course not, and raising the women's devo game to 18 is only for the newest round anyway.
But just a suggestion for the 2027 game onwards.

 

[manafana]

will try get team together this week

 

[bminchow]

I think I have mine ready. Well I have it down to three different potential line ups anyway

 

[manafana]

good 14 is so hard with 4,000 pts i could easily get 20 riders i want had totally rejig

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

good 14 is so hard with 4,000 pts i could easily get 20 riders i want had totally rejig

14? Check the OP: it's 16 riders each team...

 

[manafana]

my bad corrected my sheets now

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

my bad corrected my sheets now

I'll leave you out of the reminder PM I am in the middle of sending to past players then...

(because you don't need reminding, not because you're not invited)


To everyone else:
If I somehow miss you from the reminder, that would be entirely inadvertent: all welcome. Europeans: you'll need to do this before you go to bed (or before you go out partying until all hours) tomorrow night. The Women's national championship Road Race starts 11am Perth time which is 3am UTC/GMT, 4am CET, 7pm (Saturday) EST.

Hoping no-one noticed my mistaken reference earlier to start times for the Women's TDU

 

[manafana]

The women's game is so hard to pick because of small team size but decent budget, I could have bought my 14 more expensive riders I had on the bounce back list

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

So far we have 18 teams, each of which has at least one currently unique pick, and 95 different riders chosen, six of them on more than half the teams.

Only one new player so far (Welcome @yoyokt ), it would be great to have more. And rather too many of the old hands missing, so time to commit. Entries close in about 14 hours from the timestamp on this post.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

The women's game is so hard to pick because of small team size but decent budget, I could have bought my 14 more expensive riders I had on the bounce back list

Happy to have some discussion about budget/squad size for next year's game sometime before it is launched: if you don't think you can remember the issues until the end of the game, please open another thread, otherwise could we wait until the end of the season, rather than have overlapping discussions here.

 

[MADRAZO]

Regarding the budget/squad size I think its fine as it is, simply as many of us are not big experts on women cycling and making a team of 16 for 4000 is a lot easier and less time demaning to do decently than for instance something like the Mens format 33/7500, and yes it means cutting out a lot of good or interesting picks, but that is always also the case for the men, and also there are simply a lot more male riders to choose from than women, so I think the format of around half of the mens game is quite well balanced. And making it 4000 instead of something lower for the 16 riders also means there has to be some tough expensive choises so its not just young talents and cheap bounce back riders, so again I think its quite well balanced.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I have looked at the CQ team ranking, and in the past two years the top 15 teams have averaged around 3900 points. The average team size has been around 18, although that also includes stagiaires and riders that haven't had a contract with the teams for the entire season. Of course if you include all teams that are taking part in the biggest races the average score is lower.

What we know is the top male riders may score up to twice as much as the top female riders, but also that it can be leveled out by the rest of the team averaging higher scores than the lower scoring riders in a men's WT team, because the teams are smaller and the CQ points distribution isn't the same for both genders.

I am not sure 4000 points is the best limit, but it is a nice round number which 3900, 3800 or 3750 aren't (that said, the 7500 for the men's game isn't really a perfect amount on paper either). It may be a good solution to raise the team size to 18, but the idea behind the men's game has also been to have it be a reflection of the real world, so with that in mind it doesn't make sense to have our teams be larger than the actual WWT teams.

 

[RedheadDane]

Why not just have team sizes be a range, like the Main Game?
Say... between 16 and 20.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Why not just have team sizes be a range, like the Main Game?
Say... between 16 and 20.

There's no problem with being short in your roster (except in the GT games, where that is not a case of foregoing a free pick): Skidmark is in the 2025-7 edition of Emerging Riders with a vacancy in his line up ( and would only need to have had a 46 point scorer to be in the lead). So if you want to consider this game to be 12 to 16 riders, or even 1-16, feel free.

4000 pts and 18 riders would reduce the spend per rider to 222, closer to the Main Game's 227 than the 250 we currently haave. Would it actually make choices at the top of the price range tighter, or just mean a couple more cheap fillers? Or maybe that's not a a bad thing, that's what rewards keeping one's ear to the ground.

But there is not a close parallel between men's and women's: 250 points would place you 98th in the CQ women's scores for 2025, and 222 would be 111th; 227 points is 298th in the men's, and 298th in the women's is 75 points, but a 1500 budget for 20 riders would, I think, be too restrictive. Perhaps more importantly in making the game attractive, I can look at the men who are placed 300th-400th in the men's rankings and have some knowledge of most of them: in the same range on the women's tables, there are very few names that ring a bell. That is to some extent my culpable ignorance, but I don't think it is atypical.

So I think something that makes expensive picks have a real opportunity cost for the rest of the team is what we should look for. There are 4 women with a big gap to 5th in the 2025 CQ ranking: picking one of them impinges on the rest of the team (reduces spend/rider to 148-179 per rider for the other 15), picking two of them, even the cheaper pair (Reusser and Longo-B) means only 86 per rider for the other 14. So I think that the goal of making managers be restrictive in what expensive picks they go for is met. If one were to take less extreme high scores, say 9th and 10th last year, that would mean an average of 182 remains for the rest of the team. But I haven't looked into whether the distribution of points at the top of the tables in 2025 was typical of the long term situation.

And as Madrazo says above (this is a later addition, so he was not liking a post for citing him), it is good for the budget to be high enough that there is at least some temptation to spend really big on one rider. Maintaining consistency with previous budgets has meant that Pogacar has not been allowable in some recent Spring Classics/GT games.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I hope (a lot) more people signed up since yesterday. Otherwise I would be open to move the deadline to the start of TDU, but with a possible deduction of any points scored at the Australian and Thai championships for entries received after the original cutoff date.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

I'm just finishing another task, then I was going to post. We have 25 teams, which is about typical. A few notable absences, but some new players too.

I'll hold off on putting up the teams until tomorrow: people can vote on Samu's proposal by thumbs up or angry face on that post, and I'll decide on the basis of that.

Part of my setting the National Championships rather than the TDU as the deadline was to be able to share publicly the list of Emerging Female Riders Game eligible names (35 of them) without spilling the beans here. I thought that would help boost participation there. How do you want to handle that?

Teams in by the initial deadline:

AlbertoGiant

AmisVelo

ArmchairCyclist

Bminchow

DaniHR

DJSprtsch

DkOne

EvansIsTheBest

JonEzeitza

Josedin

Leadbelly

LibertineSeguros

LosBrolin

Madrazo

Manafana

MuddyWaters

Nevs

RedheadDane

Rufs

Ruvu

SamuCuenca

Shalgo

SlowClimber

TRiley36

Yoyokt

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I'm just finishing another task, then I was going to post. We have 25 teams, which is about typical. A few notable absences, but some new players too.

I'll hold off on putting up the teams until tomorrow: people can vote on Samu's proposal by thumbs up or angry face on that post, and I'll decide on the basis of that.

Part of my setting the National Championships rather than the TDU as the deadline was to be able to share publicly the list of Emerging Female Riders Game eligible names (35 of them) without spilling the beans here. I thought that would help boost participation there. How do you want to handle that?

Teams in by the initial deadline:

AlbertoGiant

AmisVelo

ArmchairCyclist

Bminchow

DaniHR

DJSprtsch

DkOne

EvansIsTheBest

JonEzeitza

Josedin

Leadbelly

LibertineSeguros

LosBrolin

Madrazo

Manafana

MuddyWaters

Nevs

RedheadDane

Rufs

Ruvu

SamuCuenca

Shalgo

SlowClimber

TRiley36

Yoyokt

25 teams is one more than last year, so it's entirely possible the "talent pool" simply isn't larger at the moment.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

One of our participants, @jon ezeitza , runs a Women's CQ game over at Parlamento Ciclista (several of our regulars are also to be found there)

It's similar in that all you have to do is pick your team at the beginning of the year, and then watch t see what happens with neither the chance, not the need, to intervene. Also based on the same price list as you have been studying for this, and scores being CQ points won.

It is slightly more complicated:

• 20 riders
• 10000 point budget
• only 1 out of Weibes/Vollering; 1 of Reusser/Longo Borghini; 1 of Balsamo/Chabbey; 1 of Labous/Le Court; 1 of Bredewold/Niewiadoma (you may not take, for example, both Reusser and ELB on the grounds that you had neither of Weibes and Vollering)
• At least three U23s (ie born 2004 or later). Three of your U23s score at an enhanced rate: one has her score doubled, another has a 60% bonus, a third gets 40% added on. You would need to mark which rider you want to get what level of bonus.

If you have some knowledge of Spanish, you can find out more here. If you would like to enter via this forum, I am sure Jon E would be happy for me to forward entries to him. Entries close on night of 16th/17th January (ie shortly before the WTDU), points from the Aussie Nationals will not be counted.

Once the game starts, Jon posts weekly updates: not much Spanish needed to follow the tables of scores, but if there are a number of non-Spanish speakers from here taking part, I'm sure we can sort something. He runs a host of categories. He also populates the thread with general news of the women's racing scene.

I won in 2023, and came second in 2024, using teams largely based on tips I picked up from entries in my game here: give it a go.

 

[skidmark]

I'm a dummy - I had it in my head that the deadline was the 12th (I don't know why), and didn't click that it'd of course be tied to the first race of the season. Well, if the deadline is extended I'd happily work on a team before the TDU, but if not I'll be back next season

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I'm a dummy - I had it in my head that the deadline was the 12th (I don't know why), and didn't click that it'd of course be tied to the first race of the season. Well, if the deadline is extended I'd happily work on a team before the TDU, but if not I'll be back next season

If someone should get a pass you must be the prime candidate. AC won't announce the teams until tomorrow, so if you got the time to quickly scramble a team together you may possibly be in the clear no matter what.

But one thing's for sure: you have until the TDU to enter my Emerging Female riders game