When to play the Free Hit?

 

This topic comes to prominence this week because so many FPL managers somehow thought that last week - Gameweek 3 - was not merely a suitable, but a necessary, inevitable occasion for them to use the chip; and many more, it seems, are now succumbing to the same folly in Gameweek 4.

I covered the factors affecting the Free Hit decision in full detail last year, but... here's a quick recap.

For the second half of the season, you have to hang on to the Free Hit in the expectation that you will need it to dig you out of a hole in one of the blank gameweeks caused by the League Cup Final, and the FA Cup Semi-Finals and Final. And if, by some happy chance, you find you don't need it for that (occasionally it happens that few of the big teams are affected by the fixture clashes with these Cup games, and you might be able to dance around the inconvenience with some saved-up Free Transfers), it's quite fun to deploy it as a late-season 'smart-bomb' to help you through one of the final rounds of a mini-league cup competition.

For the first-half of the season, though, you have two choices: a) save it for a possible emergency; or b) use it opportunistically to potentially boost your points returns in a gameweek with an unusual set of fixtures.

a)  Emergencies

It is possible to be hit with multiple short-term injuries (and suspensions) all at once, particularly when fatigue and miserable weather combine with the absurd fixture congestion at the end of the year. You don't want to be wasting transfers moving short-term absentees out of your squad and back in again; and if there's a chance that most of them might only miss a single gameweek, it's nice to be able to use your Free Hit to see you through that short-term crisis - until you find out if you might have to spend some 'hits' on any remaining problems the following week. There is also a small - but non-negligible - risk of late postponements for freak reasons such as foul weather or terrorism or pandemic, which can also leave you wanting to make multiple changes for one week only. I think there's usually so little reliable value in using the Free Hit as a 'bonus chip' that you should certainly consider saving it until the latter part of December, to guard against such a possibility of unforeseen calamity.

b)  Opportunistic points boost

You can try this when most of your usual squad players are facing particularly challenging fixtures and/or most of the gameweek's apparently 'easy' fixtures are for teams you don't have much representation from (these two circumstances frequently coincide, but not invariably so; your regular players in an averagely-difficult fixture will probably outperform players from lesser teams even with a very easy fixture; so, you don't really want to consider this option for the chip unless both circumstances apply).

Having a single match in the gameweek where a lot of your players are involved on opposing sides doesn't really meet that threshold - even if, as in the recent Gameweek 3, it was two of the top teams, and many people may have had 5 or 6 players from them. There will almost certainly be some gameweeks over the next few months where there are two or three matches involving the top teams playing against each other.... and more promising fixtures for many of the lesser sides you don't usually have many - or any - players from (that really wasn't the case last weekend; and, as I've said recently about playing an early Bench Boost, there's no sense in playing any of the chips early in the season - because form hasn't settled down yet, performances are erratic, results are unpredictable; you just don't know who to pick, or what kind of returns you can expect.... until well into the second month of the season, usually).

You should, however, be able to tolerate having your players in 'non-ideal' fixtures occasionally (the best players can give you good returns against anyone; you might be pleasantly surprised). You should also have a strong enough bench that moving 2 or 3 or 4 players out of the starting lineup for a gameweek because they face a particularly daunting fixture should not be a problem. And if a fixture, or set of fixtures, looks likely to cause you more inconvenience than that, you should be able to plan ahead and save up Free Transfers, so that you can move the necessary players out of your squad short-term (it's a lot easier to carry out fairly major squad reshuffles since the rules were revised to allow us bank up 5 Free Transfers).

So, the threshold for wanting/needing to use a Free Hit to navigate an unusual set of fixtures should be set pretty high (as with a Wildcard!); unless there are at least 7 or 8 players you want to change, you should try to find another way of dealing with the situation.