The Forecasters Challenge 2009

© Tangotiger

On May 9, 2008, and again on June 5, 2008, Nate Silver, architect of Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA, and forecaster at the political site FiveThirtyEight.com, issued a challenge to fellow political forecaster Dick Bennett at American Research Group in picking the winner of the Democratic primary, state-by-state. That challenge went unanswered.

Inspired by the challenge, and having done a multitude of Forecaster assessments in the past, the website TangoTiger.net is issuing a similar challenge. The concept is simple enough:

1. We will create a simple scoring system.
2. Each Forecaster provides an ordered list of players.
3. Forecasters will be drawn at random to determine draft order.
4. We will create a program to automate the draft, snake-style, until the rosters are filled. That’s the team you get, no trading or moves.
5. We then repeat steps 3 and 4 at least one thousand times. (The running of so many drafts is to limit the amount of luck one good or bad pick can have on the outcome. It is unlikely that one Forecaster would have ended up with Cliff Lee one thousand times in 2008.)

Then, we’ll see how everyone does at the end of the year. The leader gets to promote the fact that they won The Forecasters Challenge.

This challenge is being issued in a spirit of fun and sportsmanship.

Here are the Full Rules and List of Participants.