An ADDENDUM

I realise I omitted one small but quite important little wrinkle in my earlier post on Fantasy tactics for a knockout tournament like the current Club World Cup.

I did so because the main post was getting over-long. And also because I felt this was pretty obvious. But tournaments of this type come up so rarely - and are so brief compared to the 9-month week-in/week-out grind of a Fantasy Football game based on a domestic league - that many Fantasy enthusiasts really seem to struggle to get their heads around them. (I suspect, in fact, that many people only play the Fantasy Euros tournament once every 4 years or so. World Cup Fantasy ought to be HUGE; but it isn't, because FIFA is crap - the game is badly put together, and receives almost no promotion. And I don't even know if there is a Fantasy game for AFCON or the Copa America...?)

Hence this supplement....

One way you can spread risk a little, to try to contain the problem of possibly disastrous losses of players to elimination if one or two results go against you in the knockout rounds of the tournament is.... to balance up the number of players you have from each side in a tie. If you have 3 players from both teams - or 4, or 5, or 6 - you're bound to lose that many players whatever the result, but you also know how many you're definitely going to be keeping. (And, of course, you don't have to balance the numbers on each side exactly: 5 + 4 or 4 + 3 is fine.)  If you only back one team in a tie, you can't afford to risk taking many players from them.

This possibility of backing both sides in a game is generally of most use in the semi-finals - although it can occasionally be applicable in the quarter-finals too.

And it's most appealing where you have two of the best teams drawn against each other, so you know you're going to want lots of these players in the next round, whoever goes through - but it's dangerous/impossible to predict which of them will.

As I said in the earlier post, I don't usually like to take more than 4 players from one team in the semi-final round. But in exceptional circumstances, you might push that limit a little.

In the Final, you can get by with a light bench, or even no bench at all; and in the Club World Cup, we're getting 6 Free Transfers ahead of the last game (in some tournaments it's 7!), so you could in theory risk losing up to 10 players from the semi-finals and still muster a full starting eleven for the Final, without having to spend any points on additional transfers. The most obvious way to do this with the current semi-final match-ups is to take 5 players each from Paris St Germain and Real Madrid (you might even go to 6 players from one of them) and a lesser number from Chelsea (few or none from Fluminense, since no-one seems to fancy their chances very highly; though you might perhaps have one or two budget-saving gaps on the bench by now - so, only 2 or 3 or 4 Chelsea players, 1 or 0 from Fluminense). 

This way, even with 6 players from one of the favourites, you couldn't possibly lose more than 10 players to elimination. If you took 5 or 6 players each from two teams in different ties, it could be disastrous for you if they both lost (however remote that possibility might appear, it could happen!). Therefore, if you want to take a large number of players from two teams in a late round of a knockout competition - you can only afford to do it if they're playing each other.

However,... it is extremely likely that you will also lose 1 or 2 players at least to injury or suspension (or falling-out with their manager, or 'family issue', or whatever...). And, as I said, a lot of people have already opted to leave 1 or 2 gaps in the squad, so the number you can lose to elimination is reduced by that amount. Plus, you'd probably really like to have some Free Transfers still available to be able to make some elective changes - swapping in players who look to be coming into stronger form than some of the ones you have already.

So, you really don't want to take such liberties with the elimination risk by exposing yourself to the maximum possible loss - or anywhere near it, ideally (though, generally, that's just about impossible to avoid).

But actually, an even stronger reason to avoid taking a large number of players from one team is that it probably won't do you much good, even in the current round. There are only a handful of players, even in a really elite team, who are going to produce good Fantasy returns in a game. You usually do better to identify one or two of the most promising prospects from a less fancied team than by loading up on more Galacticos....  And this is even more the case where two top teams are facing each other, as we will soon have with PSG and Real. Hopefully, it will be a feast of football; but it is also likely to be a pretty tight, and possibly quite a low-scoring game - in which few if any of the players deliver big Fantasy returns.