posted
Fantasy Congress lets you draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. Want to start a Hatrack league?
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Wow. If there was a Canadian version, I'd definitely be in. As it is I'll have to mull over how involved in American politics I have the time and inclination to be. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Only problem, I've never played any type of fantasy sport, and the explanations on the site seem to assume I have. Can anyone explain it to me using simple language?
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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Basically, it's a points based game where each person controls a team of players (the first action in any fantasy league is the draft, where everyone picks players up one at a time -- like in gym class back in the day). From their roster they must decide which players to start and which to bench (which they can change regularly -- feed the hot hand, so to speak). The challenge is both to draft a strong team and then decide which players to start and bench.
In this game, it looks like points are scored strictly by the congressmen's role in pushing through legislature.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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The scoring in this game is pretty complex (to me), reflecting the complexity of passing legislation, I guess. In regular fantasy sports, you get points based on player performance, so in fantasy football, any time a player of yours scores a touchdown, you might get 6 points, or in baseball, a homerun might be worth 4 points. These accumulate over the course of a season (or a session in the case of Congress), and the team with the highest score wins. As noted above, generally you can't play all your team at once, so you have to pick people you think will be particularly active/perform well. This could me substituting members of your team as you see fit.
One strategy is to look at how the Congresspeople did in each "player category", and pick the one's that had the best score last round. You can do this from the game's web site.
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I signed up as well. I don't think we've created a league yet, and if we haven't, I'll do so.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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The Pts system is a bit more complicated, but it assigns all the points for you, so you pretty much get to just watch C-Span and cheer.
The part I am most sad about, is that I'm going to be spending the next 3 weeks until the midterms scouting out the 535 members of congress.
I have a couple questions I didn't see answers to though. When does the "Season" start? Anytime? Or with the new Congress (which makes the most sense)? So our next round would start after the midterms right?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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According to the front page, they are "re-running" (???) the last session. The next season starts when the next congressional session happens, which is in a few weeks (they termed it the "lame duck" session). It'll be after the mid-terms, but before the new reps are sworn in. Probably as tumultuous a session as you'll get.
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My apologies if anyone already created a league, but I started one called Hatrack League with the password: osc. Join whenever.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Two of the higher scoring Republicans in the Senate, Mike DeWine and Rick Santorum are almost for sure going to be voted out of office in the midterms.
The odd thing about this is that when you pick up a good quarterback in the NFL fantasy draft, chances are he's going to rock the next year.
However, just because a senator passed a lot of legislation one year, doesn't bear a whole lot on how that senator might perform the next year, even if the guy is in a senior leadership position (though those guys are the best bets). In general your best bet is going to be the guys in charge, as their committee heads are going to determine whether or not your bill ever makes it out of committee to begin with.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I don't know how lame duck congresses work, though. Should I be picking Republicans or Democrats? It's such an odd kind of session.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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I joined, but am having trouble drafting my team. I keep running into some kind of error. I'll try again later.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Click Advanced Search to search by legislator. You can see what they sponsor and how far the bills got. Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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I say we activate the league this weekend and play to get a feel of it until the election, then the new round starts right? So then we repick, depending on who got voted out, and start over with a wee bit experience.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I signed up, but I'm going to start a league in my Government & Politics class. One is enough for now.
Posts: 1401 | Registered: Jun 2004
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The new season would start in January, if I am reading the site correctly. We'd have a short season of one session, which would probably be perfect if we activated right now.
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Hey, I know it's been a year since we all did this, but I thought I'd let everyone know that the FantasyCongress site and game has been totally revamped.
Before, you could just pick your team and basically everyone could have an identical team. Now it's more like a real fantasy league, with a real draft, a bench, and you can trade and pick up "free agents." The scoring doesn't look that complicated anymore (it hasn't changed much, if at all).
And they are looking to add a lot of other scoring factors in, like an attendance score, a "Maverick" score which earns you extra points when your player votes on an issue that breaks ranks with their own party.
I think they made a lot of improvements, and I'd be very interested in doing this again (well, it never really got off the ground last time, but still). Seasons now aren't full 2 year terms of Congress or what not, it looks like they work on 3-month stretches, the current session, or at least the current season is that way.
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