The great CHIP Dilemma

This conundrum presents itself every year - In what order should we play our Free Hit and 2nd Wildcard chips?

In general, the Free Hit would seem better suited to helping you dance around the problem of a big Blank Gameweek - when many top teams, and hence many of your best players, may be missing from the action for one week only.

And the Wildcard is traditionally preserved for use just ahead of the big Double Gameweek, which usually follows close after it,... but this year, oddly, is going to precede it. (You might, of course, use your Wildcard in the Double Gameweek; but a big Double is usually a good opportunity to get the most out of the Bench Boost chip - and, since you can only use one chip per gameweek, people tend to use their Wildcard to 'set up' their squad to optimise all 15 players with the best fixtures the week before the Double so that they can use Bench Boost the following week.)

However, there's no hard-and-fast rule: you always need to stay flexible in your approach to chip play.

The optimum use of the chips in any given year will depend on how the fixtures break on those crucial weekends (do the blanks/doubles involve a lot of your players, or not?), and on the subsequent run of fixtures (do you actually want to keep most of your doublers for more than that one gameweek?).

For Gameweeks 33/34 this year, with only a small number of teams involved, and mostly not the most popular ones in FPL at the moment - it was really looking as though, for most FPL managers, you'd probably only want additional players from the doubling teams in GW33, but not thereafter (indeed, you might even want to reduce or eliminate your exposure to those teams by removing some of your long-term holds from them, because their form was stuttering or ther run-ins looked a little shakey). In contrast, many of the players you were loading up on in the subsequent Blank Gameweek 34 were not just one-week makeweights, but players coming into form and/or facing a promising final month of fixtures, players you would want to keep for the remainder of the season.

And thus.... playing the Free Hit for the double in GW33 and the Wildcard for the blank in GW34 was probably the more sensible option this time around.

It can work out either way. But it's usually very much better one way than the other - and that can be a tricky choice to make.... And the answer could be different in each year. [At least, that's how it is now - since we no longer have any truly big Blank/Double Gameweeks to worry about, as the FA Cup Quarter-Final weekend has been removed from the League programme from this year. In the past, with a really huge Blank and Double resulting from up to 8 rearranged fixtures, the case for using Free Hit to survive the BIG Blank was pretty overwhelming...]