Another way of looking at LUCK in FPL

 

Following on from my comments the oher day about the perils of over-confidence, I want to make a further observation about how we should view our LUCK in this game.

In Tuesday's post, I pointed out that if our self-confidence in regard to our FPL decisions were what cognitive psychologists call 'well-calibrated', it would correspond exactly to the probability of the outcomes we were betting on with those choices. But there are so many variables at play in a game like football that no one game event ever has anything like a 100% probability; in fact, with there usually being multiple potential outcomes to any situation, very few of them can properly be said to have anything near even a 50/50 chance of happening. [Even an absolutely 'ever-present' player can.... catch a cold, break his toe in the shower on match-day morning, wrap his sports car around a lamp-post, have a row with his manager or his girlfriend.... No-one, absolutely NO-ONE has a 100% probability of even starting a game, let alone of achieving any particular points-outcome in it.]

We should never presume to know what a player is going to do in a game. The best we can hope for is to formulate a fairly reasonable projection of his range of likeliest points-outcomes.

And then we have to try to judge what the median likelihood return is on that spectrum of expected possible returns.

Now, it is always more likely that a player will only perform at the lower-end of that scale - or perhaps even have an unexpectedly disastrous week and return well below even his lowest predicted outcome. A disappointing - or, sometimes, outright terrible - return is almost invariably a far more likely outcome than some kind of very big points haul. Thus, the median point of a player's projected most likely returns for the gameweek will not be in the middle, but skewed quite significantly towards the lower end of the range.

Now, of course, as I observed in that post on Tuesday, if a player does really, really well for us, we always like to convince outselves that we absolutely foresaw this - with perfect confidence - and are thus absolutely deserving of all the points we receive. But in fact, even a middling points return is usually at least a little bit above what would have been a reasonable median outcome, and you should be very happy with any such returns. Every really big haul you get is well above what you could reasonably have expected as a return on this basis; every really big haul is, to a significant degree, 'LUCKY'.

Our results in this game are not earned 100% by merit. We should be more ready to acknowledge our debts to good fortune and the caprices of Fate, to cultivate an attitude of humility and gratitude when we enjoy really big points returns - rather than constantly trying to deceive ourselves into believing that such a result was entirely deserved.