So, what does MAKE THE DIFFERENCE in FPL?

Last month, I made the rather bold assertion that... it doesn't matter all that much which players you pick in FPL. And I promised to soon go into more detail about what I believe does make the most difference to your outcomes in the game (but I was thwarted in that resolution by the sudden loss of my computer and Internet access!). Finally, I am trying to address that topic.

Now, of course, as I acknowledged in that earlier post, it does matter to some extent who you pick; just... not nearly as much as we'd all like to hope. Some FPL managers make a lot of really bad picks, and of course they don't deserve to prosper (although sometimes they do; there's too little justice in the game). But my key point there had been that there is usually quite a broad spread of potential good picks; and within that field of sensible, promising selections, most players will perform just about as well as each other - certainly over the full season, or a big chunk of it; but also surprisingly often over even a fairly short run of games. I have sometimes run multiple teams, with radically different tactics and selections - but they ended up with nearly identical final points totals. I regularly compare myself against a number of long-time managers that I consider to be shrewd and consistent; there are rarely more than 100 points between us at season's end, sometimes a lot less - even though we've made some wildly different picks. Yes, most years, there are a few players (maybe just one; maybe none...) who are performing so consistently above the general range of everyone else that they become genuine must-haves. But most managers recognise that Haaland or Palmer or Saka or whoever is an 'essential' (at least, for now; that status rarely lasts a whole season). There's almost always room for plenty of debate around who are the 'best of the rest' that you should have in the squad. And amongst these better players, there are usually many potential selections of almost exactly equal value.

So, unless you ignore this pool of solid talent, and wilfully make a lot of bad picks, most of your player selections aren't actually going to have a huge impact on your final points total or your rank - at least, as compared to other good FPL managers.

So, what does..... make the difference in our game?

I believe the main factors determining FPL outcomes are as follows:

1) Getting off to a flying start. The opening of the season is one big lottery. There are so many unknowns - players have switched clubs, some managers have changed, tactics may shift dramatically in the new season, revisions to PGMOL guidelines may have a huge impact (vastly fewer penalties over the last two years, while goalmouth wrestling at set-pieces is now routinely tolerated....; though that might change next year), and the pre-season friendlies don't usually give us any reliable guide as to what anyone's form or fitness or confidence is going to be like going into actual competitive games; we are essentially betting blind with our initial squad selection.

If you are lucky enough to correctly guess nearly all of the players who are going to make the hottest start to the season, you don't just get nice scores in the opening few gameweeks, you can get a huge momentum continuing through the first third or so of the season. People who've been less lucky, and have picked a lot of players who are unexpectedly dropped or strangely struggling for form, will have to use multiple transfers - perhaps even take a few 'hits' - over the opening weeks to put things right; they may even be forced into using their first Wildcard early - thereby missing out on the considerable advantage that it can give you if you are able to use it later in the first half of the season for a tactical rebuild at a key moment. 

While it is not impossible to make up for a poor start, it is very, very difficult: it can take until the mid-point of the season, or even longer. And it is possible, all too possible, to suffer such a bad start that you will never get back into the top 1 million.

 

2)  Being lucky with your captaincy picks.  While we do occasionally get a player who has such a long run of consistently high returns (not every week, but often enough to make him worth repeatedly betting on with the armband) that you can make them your default captaincy choice, even then you can't really expect them to give you a strong return more than about 1 week in 3 on average (and, even when they do, they often won't in fact be your highest points producer of the week!), And even when it might be reasonable to keep picking one outstanding player most of the time, it's never a good idea to make someone an invariable choice. Even last year, when Salah had such an improbable, record-smashing season, his returns tailed off a bit over the last few months. 

You should usually expect to have at least 4 or 5 of your players in any given gameweek who have an elevated chance of returning a really good FPL score; picking 'the right one' is next-to-impossible - you'll be wrong more often than you're right. You can't realistically expect to get a nice return from your captaincy more than once in every 3-4 gameweeks; and that will only actually be your best score of the week about half as often.

Unless.... you're very, very lucky. If your 'success rate' with the captaincy shifts upwards from a normal (actually, good) 30% to more like 50%, that can make a big difference to your eventual points tally. [An 'average' captaincy return is 4-5 points, a 'poor' one 2 or less, a 'good one' 8-10 points. So, every 10% that your captaincy success rate improves is probably worth an extra 15-20 points.]  You do tend to find that the global champion each year has been distinguished by an extraordinarily high return from his captaincy picks.

3)  Not being too heavily hit by injuries.  There can be an enormous variance in the impact of injuries on an FPL manager over a season; and this can make a huge difference to your rank (just ask Spurs!).  My record worst, a few seasons ago, was 55 injuries in a season (and that's discounting minor knocks and illnesses that only rendered someone 'doubtful' for a week or so; that's significant problems that made someone likely to be unavailable for an extended or indefinite period, and required their immediate replacement in the squad).  I reckon my 'usual' number has been in the 30-40 range - which is probably rather above the general average.

Think about it: if you have that many injuries, you have to use almost all of your Free Transfers - and probably some 'hits' too, far more than you'd like! - just on replacing injury absentees. You have almost no scope for making elective transfers to improve your squad on the basis of changing form or fixture-difficulty. You are hamstrung, disastrously limited in how you can approach the game. An injury to a major player doesn't just rob you of the points you hoped to get from them in the coming gameweek(s), it shackles your tactical options too.

And, of course, last-minute injuries, which you aren't able to replace and leave you with an unexpected hole in your squad, can have an even more negative impact.

4)  Lucking into the players who can give you a few huge scores (perhaps just the one).  I began by saying that the majority of players from the constantly varying pool of 'sensible choices' don't generally provide much differentiation in their points returns. But a few do - over a very short run of games, really by pure fluke. And if you can be lucky enough to be on a few of these at just the right time (most of these are players who don't provide long-term value, so you don't want to be owning them before they hit their sudden 'vein of form' - or for too long afterwards), it will make a huge difference to your end-season total. 

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of FPL, because, most of the time, there is no indication of where these sudden bursts of form come from: a player who's done nothing all season, perhaps even a player who hasn't been getting regular starts, sometimes produces a great game - and a nice FPL points haul - out of nowhere. 

In general, FPL veterans counsel against 'chasing last week's points', rushing in to buy a player who's just produced one big haul. And that is mostly sound advice: most of the time, this doesn't pay off. But occasionally.... it does: the player with no established form all season will produce another good return (maybe not in the very next game, but fairly soon), and perhaps even a third. It is a torturous conundrum as to whether to bring in a player who's had 2 or 3 decent returns in a short space of time: is this really emerging form, or just a flash-in-the-pan that's already over??  [Phil Foden produced an especially goading example of this just before Christmas. He appeared to be out of favour with Pep again this year, hadn't been getting regular starts; and, when he was playing, was mostly being deployed in a rather deeper role where he was having zero attacking impact. And then, in a period of extreme fixture congestion, where there was a midweek league game as well as crucial final matches in the Champions League group stage, he suddenly played 4 successive games within the space of a fortnight (though he didn't start them all!), and produced a double-digit haul in each of them. No-one had ever done that 4 times back-to-back before; and he couldn't even really have been expected to play in all 4 of those games, when they came in such quick succession. And there really had been no reason to fancy bringing him just before the start of that sequence. If you had, you were very lucky. If you didn't have him before the streak started, you might reasonably have thought the first haul was a one-off freak. And when he did it a second time, you might reasonably have thought that he couldn't possibly do it three times in a row - and probably would get rested in the next game anyway. And once you'd missed out on 3 successive hauls, you know you've missed the party and there's no point coming in for him now - even if he might get one or two more decent returns in the coming month. Last December, I wrote at length about how we make selection decisions like this, and the timing of them - with particular reference to this Phil Foden example. That was FPL at its cruellest and most taunting.]

5)  Getting a good return from your chips.  The chips are another huge randomizing element in the game of FPL. Certainly, you can make 'smarter' or 'dumber' choices about when to play them; but there is no guarantee that the 'smarter' choices will be rewarded (or that the 'dumber' ones won't sometimes unjustly work out well!). To get a really good return from your Bench Boost, you need to have all 15 squad members starting, and producing a decent haul; and there is absolutely no way to predict when that might happen - it almost never does. [The optimum return from the Bench Boost chip is probably slightly higher than it is for the Triple Captain, but the chances of that transpiring are far lower.]  As noted above in the point on the weekly captaincy selection, over the season you can't be confident that even your best player is going to return a good haul in more than 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 games, and you can never know for sure when those games are going to be. There is usually a rather higher chance of identifying the games in which a really good haul is most likely for them; but even in those (player bang in form, his team is bang in form, opponents are in woeful defensive form), it's never better than a 50/50 as to whether he'll give you a double-digit return or a blank. And the Free Hit, at least the 2nd one, is usually more about getting yourself out of trouble (most often, in a big Blank Gameweek) than producing a positive lift in a regular gameweek.

Every gameweek in FPL is a collection of bets. When you play a chip, you're making even more bets, or increasing your stakes. This expands the range of possible outcomes and generates a high variance in FPL points returns. Some people get very lucky with these returns, some get very unlucky. And this makes a big difference overall.

FPL is all about making predictions. And you can never be confident in the outcome of a prediction. You can never know that your initial squad is going to be near-perfect for the start of the season, you can never know that your captain (or your Triple Captain!) is going to produce a good haul, you can never know if a player is about to get injured, you can never know if a player you've just transferred in is about to produce a really huge return, you can never know if you're going to going to get a good - or any worthwhile - return from playing your Bench Boost or Free Hit.

'Skill' makes some difference in our game: smart FPL managers will - almost always - do much better than dumb, naive, inexperienced ones. But amongst the smarter managers, the only difference, really, is luck. The 'margins' in the game are to be found in these most random and unpredictable elements of it.

More ways to SELF-DESTRUCT

 

The FPL forums have been awash with nutters talking about using their second Wildcard this week. Yes, in Gameweek 22, barely three weeks into the New Year! Does THE MADNESS know no end??!!

The reasons why this is an overwhelmingly BAD IDEA ought to be obvious to anyone who has played the game for more than a few years

They are as follows:

1)  For any chip, there is more risk in using it earlier in its period of availability rather than later. During half a season, there will usually be at least a few, possibly several reasonable - perhaps pressing - occasions to potentially use a chip. And some of these may crop up unexpectedly, at little or no notice: you don't know they're going to happen until they happen. Thus, the later you can leave it to play a chip, the more confident you can be that there won't any longer be a better occasion to use it arising later on.

2) The general 'leaving it later' principle above is particularly true with the Wildcard because it is a 'rebuild chip' which allows you to make substantial and lasting changes to your squad, rather than just a one-off switcheroo to allow you to earn extra points in a single gameweek like all the others. It is potentially so valuable that it really should not be thrown away lightly, at the first sign of any difficulty in your squad. You tend to accumulate need for a Wildcard over time, as drop-offs in form and injuries and suspensions progressively weaken your squad. If things look bad this week, they might be even worse in another week or two!

3)  A crisis requiring a Wildcard to rectify it can also arise very suddenly: it is not uncommon to pick up 4, 5, 6 or even more injuries (or suspensions, or fallings-out-of-favour with the manager) inside a week or two. That is the kind of catastrophe for which you may need your Wildcard. And they can occur at any time (although they tend to become more common in the final third of the season...).

4)  Although this threshold will decrease slightly later in the season, you don't really want to be considering a Wildcard unless you have a case for making at least 5 or 6 urgent changes to your squad. If players aren't unavailable - through being injured, dropped, transferred out, suspended, etc. - it's never absolutely urgent to replace them, it's simply 'elective'. You should be able to carry under-performing players on your bench for a week or three, while you stock up more Free Transfers for a 'mini-Wildcard' shake-up. You can even sometimes take a chance on leaving a few 'holes' on your bench (hang on to non-playing assets) for a little while. And if an immediate change seems likely to be particularly valuable to you, it's OK to take a 'hit' - spend the extra points on it - a few times a season. Blowing a Wildcard for only 3 or 4 - non-urgent! - changes is A COMPLETE WASTE.

5)  At the moment, no-one should have such an urgent case for multiple squad changes. Although there have been a lot of injuries over the past month or so, mercifully, so far none of these have affected any of the really 'big' players: Josko Gvardiol is the only high-owned FPL asset who's been ruled out for a long spell. Moreover, we all just enjoyed an extra 'mini-Wildcard' this year, with the unnecessary additional transfers doled out for AFCON barely a month ago. If you used those sensibly to strengthen your squad during December (or saved at least some of them to allow yourselves a few extra transfers during the injury-ravaged month of January...), there should be absolutely no need to consider multiple squad revisions - or any at all! - just now.

6)  You don't want to be using a Wildcard at a time where there is more than usual uncertainty about what's going on in the Premier League, and perhaps an imminent possibility of significant changes in the FPL player-comparison landscape. And that is very much the case at the moment, in late January. The mid-season transfer window doesn't close for another 11 days, and there's usually a late rush of activity right before the final deadline (this year, on the evening of February the 2nd); some players might yet leave the Premier League altogether, some new big names might join from overseas. And even if you don't fancy any of the new arrivals themselves, you need to be mindful of the disruptive effect they can have on team selections and playing styles, of the possible knock-on consequences for players you do own, or might like to own. These impacts will not make usually themselves fully felt until at least a few weeks after a new player has joined - or left - a club; so, for this reason alone, it is utterly, utterly DAFT to consider using the Wildcard before the second half of February, at the very earliest.

7)  Quite apart from the upheaval of the transfer window, we are deep in the 'midwinter doldrums' now: almost every team is suffering poor or fluctuating form, most players are obviously getting tired or jaded, and many are probably carrying some sort of niggling injury. A crop of new more serious injuries is arriving every week. If you use the Wildcard now, there is an elevated risk that most or all of your new selections might lose form or become unavailable altogether within a few weeks: that is why you shouldn't use it in January. 

8)  There are also some more particular factors affecting the overall player-comparison landscape just at the moment. The five main ones are: a) additional upheaval caused by the turnover of managers around this time of year (Maresca and Amorim have just been replaced; Glasner had looked likely to go, but might survive; Frank looks under extreme threat, Dyche, Espirito Santo, and possibly even Howe also at some risk); b) the immediate and dramatic improvement displayed by Manchester United on being freed from the shackles of Ruben Amorim; c) the upturn in form and fighting spirit starting to be shown by all the clubs at the bottom of the table, making relative 'fixture difficulty' much more difficult to assess; d) the return of AFCON players (most of the more popular FPL choices went deep into the tournament and have only just rejoined their clubs; Senegal and Morocco were in the final last Sunday, and it is not clear if - probably rather unlikely that - their players will be back, or able to be immediately reintegrated into their club sides this weekend); e) the conundrum of Cole Palmer (and perhaps also of Mo Salah and Ollie Watkins); he's playing again at last, and faces a short run of fairly 'easy'-looking fixtures over the next month or so; many FPL managers are bringing him in just because of this enticing fixture-run - but that's almost certainly dangerously premature. He's still being troubled by recurring muscular discomfort, and is obviously a long way short of full stamina and match sharpness (he looked absolutely exhausted at the end of last week's game against Brentford, and he hadn't even been all that 'busy' in it - compared to his usual all-action standards); he isn't yet anywhere near his best, and looks like he might take at least a few more weeks to get there. If/when he does, he'll almost certainly be worth having; but because he's so expensive, that's probably going to require at least three or four transfers - not just one - to accomplish, to reallocate budget around a squad. The only other 'premium' players this season - Salah, Watkins, and Saka - might present a similar dilemma; we know they have the potential to make an enormous FPL contribution - but they haven't been doing so thus far; as soon as that changes, we may want them again,... and we may need to make multiple changes in one gameweek to achieve that. (You don't necessarily need a Wildcard to make these changes; in fact, you really shouldn't. But the point here is that there are a number of likely circumstances that might make you want to make substantial changes to your squad again in the near future - and these might undo many of the changes you've just made with your silly, premature Wildcard.)

Now do you see???

And, oh gawd, some people are talking about using their Bench Boost too. There's a much simpler argument against that. With so much injury, fatigue, and important European and domestic Cup games cramping the schedule at the moment, and thus a heightened rate of unpredictable player rotations - you can't count on anyone being a guaranteed starter at the moment; and thus it's very unlikely that all 15 of your squad will start (which is the bare minimum criterion for considering a Bench Boost play). Also, just about no-one has a really strong bench at the moment (you usually have to use some saved transfers or a Wildcard to 'set up' an optimum squad to get a really good Bench Boost return). And, even if this weekend's games were happening in less unsettled February or March, it still wouldn't be a good gameweek for a Bench Boost: there just aren't that many attractive fixture match-ups!!!

People considering either of these chip plays this week (or, good grief, yes, the Triple Captain or Free Hit too), are just BORED, IMPATIENT, or DEPRESSED (taking the recent run of terrible gameweek returns too personally: wake up, people, it's been SHIT for everyone lately!!), and looking to cheer themselves up with a whacky and impulsive move. All you are doing, my friends, is shooting yourselves in the foot. You'll get no decent advantage from these chips this week; and you will soon be ruing your choice when an obviously much better - or more necessary - occasion to use them comes along.

Sometimes.... BRAVERY pays off

LBJ's Brass Balls

I had always thought that this Gameweek 17 fixture, at home, against West Ham, would be Erling's Haaland's best prospect for a big haul in the first half of the season - and thus the prime opportunity for betting the Triple Captain chip on him.

But it would have been a very, very risky play to hang on this long, to ignore all the tempting rival options for the chip in earlier fixtures...

West Ham looked the worst team in the league at the start of the season; but they might have improved. And they have: quickly getting rid of the anodyne Graham Potter was a positive step, and there have been some promising signs for them under Nuno Espiritu Santo's stewardship since - although they're still often a bit ropey in defence, especially on set-pieces.

City might not have been able to maintain a strong title challenge this year - especially after they lost Rodri again so early on. But in fact, they have steadily got better and better, after a rather shakey start.

The big Viking might have picked up an injury by now, or suffered a bit of a dip in form; but in fact, he's having his best season yet, maintaining an astonishing level of consistency in output all the way through to the middle of the football year.

So - waiting till now to use the Triple Captain on him.... has paid off very nicely! But damn, you needed cojones to hang on for this long!! 

And it probably wasn't the smart move for this chip. Waiting this long was too big a risk; and if the plan had gone awry at the last minute, because of a late injury to Haaland, you'd have few other remaining options for using the chip, with just two more gameweeks in its validity period after this one.

If you enjoy a big success on the Triple Captain chip - or any of the bonus chips - you should maintain a due sense of humility. 

A one-off punt like this always has a bigger chance of going horribly wrong than it does of succeeding. And if you wait until the very tail-end of their availability window to play one of the bonus chips, the chance of that play going very, very wrong is greatly increased. 

A big return from a chip - however 'likely' it seemed - is always to a large extent LUCKY.

[The picture at the top is of a giant 'Brass Balls' sculpture, supposedly those of US President Lyndon Johnson (who famously complained of his trousers always being too tight in the crotch!), recently commissioned as a joke by John Oliver (standing next to the huge hanging scrotum here), the presenter of award-winning Sunday night political comedy show 'Last Week Tonight'.]

Just because you CAN, it doesn't mean you SHOULD

 

This applies particularly to transfer decisions in FPL: even if you feel there's a really pressing need to use a transfer to make a change right now, there's very likely to be an even more valuable use of it a little later on. Being able to use 2 or more transfers at once can be enormously powerful in expanding the scope of your possible changes and allowing major reallocations of budget.

But this doesn't apply only when using 1 or 2 transfers; it's just as true when making multiple changes at once. You need to be really, really sure that they are all immediately essential - because they're almost certainly not! The possibility of saving some of them for a further multiple change a little later on should not be overlooked.

We are seeing a particularly striking instance of this phenomenon just at the moment, because of the FPL Gnomes' over-generous - pointless - Early Christmas Gift of extra free transfers (supposedly to help tide us over AFCON: a very minor problem for which such additional help is completely unnecessary), so that we all now have a full complement of 5 saved transfers.

Many FPL managers have immediately blown the whole lot in one fell swoop. As I have commented recently on a few of the forums: Some of these extra transfers will almost certainly be more useful at some point in the future. Unlike the first Wildcard (and the extra Free Hit we've been given for the first time this year), this AFCON 'mini-Wildcard' has no time-limit, it can be rolled forward indefinitely... into the next half of the season. 

And keeping at least 1 or 2 of these transfers short-term, to cover a possible winter injury crisis or bad weather postponement, would be more valuable than an immediate splurge of impulse shopping. The thing that saves most people from over-indulging in chasing last week's points through silly 'sheep picks' is that they only have 1 or 2 transfers to use at a time. Doling out 5 at once was an especially inventive piece of cruelty from the FPL Gnomes, a damaging temptation that will just lead a lot of people into making rash and needless changes.

Using up 2 or 3, or maybe even 4 of these windfall transfers straight away would have been fine; but not keeping at least 1 or 2 of them in hand for a rainy day (or a snowy one, or a windy one...), literal or metaphorical, is likely to end in regrets.

And of course, the problem with choosing instant gratification over the delayed alternative is that we know rationally that the delayed gratification will be better for us,... but we can't resist the emotional satisfaction of indulging ourselves right now.

This is a hazard in FPL with playing the Bonus Chips as well: it is very easy to drop them on the first vaguely promising fixture that comes along. But the further into the season you get, the surer you can feel about your players' form and prospects (whether your preferred Triple Captain candidate, or your entire team/squad for the Bench Boost), and about the likely form of all the clubs and the likely outcome of their fixtures. And the nearer you get to the end of the window of availability of use for a chip, the more confident you can be that there are unlikely now to be many - or any - better options in which to play it in the future. Picking an optimum gameweek in which to use a Bonus Chip is very, very difficult; but it's almost never going to be in the opening month or two of the season.

Try to learn the value of waiting....

Free Hit opportunity?

 

I mentioned yesterday that there were some tempting opportunities to play the first Free Hit coming up over the final month-and-a-bit of this first half of the season (although you might want to 'keep your powder dry' and just hang on to it until GW19 in case of a game-postponement emergency caused by bad weather...).

The problem is that gameweeks that look promising for one bonus chip usually look good for the others too (in fact, I already covered why the sets of fixtures in some of the upcoming gameweeks are attractive for either a Bench Boost or Free Hit play).

But probably the most appealing option of the lot for a Free Hit would be the imminent Gameweek 13. There are a number of teams we wouldn't normally fancy who are this week playing what look like much weaker sides: Villa playing Wolves, Brentford playing Burnley, City playing Leeds, Liverpool playing West Ham, and Spurs playing Fulham (although the last two are perhaps rather questionable, given Liverpool's and Spurs's recent form!). Moreover, you might want to avoid having players from the top-of-the-table clash between Chelsea and Arsenal, which might end up being close and cagey, and is certainly quite hard to call. Crystal Palace v Manchester United, Everton v Newcastle, Nottingham Forest v Brighton, and Sunderland v Bournemouth are also quite tough to predict the outcomes of, and so perhaps better avoided if you have the chance to do so. That's what a prime Free Hit set of fixtures typically looks like.

Unfortunately,.... Erling Haaland against Leeds has to be the most attractive prospect in the first-half of the season for playing the Triple Captain chip. And so, that is likely to take priority this week for the majority of FPL managers. 

Nobody but Haaland is scoring points almost every week, and often producing big points - so, there really is no other sensible option for this chip. (Eze isn't likely to repeat this Sunday's performance again this season, if only because no other opponent is likely to play as badly against Arsenal as Spurs did here!) And the only alternative remaining time to play the chip on Haaland is Gameweek 17, when he's turning out against against West Ham at The Etihad. West Ham, though, are starting to show signs of improvement under Nuno, and are now probably a rather stronger opponent than Leeds (they weren't just a few weeks ago, but things change). Also, that's rather a long time to wait: the lanky Viking might have picked up an injury or lost form by then!

So,... if you still have all three of the bonus chips in hand, it looks like Gameweek 13 is the best bet for the Triple Captain; and you may then be left flipping a coin to decide how to split the Free Hit and Bench Boost between Gameweeks 15 and 17 - or maybe GW16 for the BB, when the fixtures are perhaps not quite so attractive, but you will have the advantage of an 'optimum set-up' thanks to the '5 Free Transfers' early Christmas present we're getting for the start of AFCON. [In fact, given that GW15 is the third set of league fixtures inside a week, there's a high risk you might be hit by a slew of injuries, or likely rest rotations, or players whose form is impaired by fatigue. If you know about those problems in advance, and they are numerous, you might be able to dodge around them with the Free Hit. But such issues might ambush you only after the gameweek deadline, which probably makes it rather too risky a week to play the Bench Boost in: the absolute essential for a good return from that chip is 15 fit players all starting for you. So, for me, it's looking like GW16 or 17 would be optimal for the BB;... and Free Hit any time you feel like it,... or feel that you need it!] 

BEST OF LUCK!!!

Always risky to play a chip after a break

 

Well, certainly one of the 'bonus' chips (and as I said yesterday, the Free Hit should really be regarded as one of these too). Though, in fact, even a Wildcard play is a bit of a shakey proposition directly after an international break, as you really want your new selections to return good points for you straight away.... and in these gameweeks, there is too much uncertainty about that.

WHY?  Because the disruption of the usual club routines for the better part of two weeks tends to have a negative impact on team and individual form, and makes game outcomes more unpredictable.

Certainty, of course, is impossible in a game like FPL; but if you're going to risk one of your valuable bonus chips, or implement a major rebuild with the Wildcard, you want to have a high degree of confidence that all of your players are likely to have good games. And you just can't have that level of confidence about likely performances in the gameweek straight after a break, just as you can't in the early weeks of the season, after the summer lay-off.

Even if players aren't physically fatigued by long-distance flights and heavy game-minutes, and haven't picked up some injury niggle that hasn't yet been publicly announced, they can often be emotionally depleted by a particularly high-stakes game (especially in this most recent break, where World Cup qualification was on the line for many teams). But more importantly, their usual routines have been broken: they've been playing with different teammates, working with different coaches, implementing different game tactics and set-piece routines to what they're used to with their clubs. And when they return, they have limited time to get back in the swing of things, with only a day or two of training before their next league match; detailed tactical preparation, in particular, can be very difficult on such a tight schedule. And even the players who stayed at their clubs, while they should be feeling fresh and well-rested, will also have missed out on full training with their regular teammates for 10 days or so.

This is why we get so many wild fluctuations in form, so many 'unexpected' results straight after a break - and thus, why it's such a big, and probably unwise, gamble to play one of your FPL chips in such a gameweek.

[I'm here trying to kick off a new series, where I aim to sum up a key idea about FPL rather more pithily than usual (though I don't have the knack of brevity, I know!), with the main point being stated in the post title. I realise at least some of the entries in my other attempt at a more concise series of posts, 'In a nutshell', may also qualify for this new category. I may have to ponder on whether there's any value in having two labels.]

How to use the Free Hit (and what it could be worth!)

 

The Free Hit is a 'novelty' that has stuck with us, first introduced into FPL in the 2017-18 season and a regular feature since. It is a 'disposable' rebuild chip, allowing you unlimited transfers in the gameweek you play it in, but with your squad automatically reverting back to its pre-Free Hit state for the following gameweek: you are 'rebuilding' for one gameweek only. (Also, note that the 'unlimited changes' are still subject to the usual constraints of overall budget and club quota. In Fantasy games for the international tournaments, there is sometimes a 'Limtless' chip that gives you a completely free rein to construct your 'perfect' squad; the Free Hit is not that. Alhough you might choose to take the risk of having a very weak bench for one week, and thus rustle up just a little bit more money than usual to spend on the starting eleven when using the chip.)

There are two main ways in which this chip can be used in FPL:

1)  As a 'rebuild' chip - in emergencies, to get around the challenge of a Blank Gameweek.

If a few teams you have high representation from are missing a match in the coming gameweek, that can leave a gaping hole in your squad. Sometimes, even a single missing match can have a big impact: last year, when the first Merseyside derby was called off at short notice because of the threat of extreme weather, many FPL managers found themselves without 4, 5, 6 Liverpool and Everton players! In circumstances like this, you might want to use the Free Hit in order to put out a strong team - where otherwise you might be having to spend 'hits' on extra transfers and/or to field a short team. And, of course, there's always a possibility - particularly in the grim midwinter months - of suddenly finding yourself with a raft of short-term injury doubts (and/or suspensions), and needing to use the Free Hit to get around that transient catastrophe.

2)  As a 'bonus' chip - to try to take advantage of an unusual set of fixtures.

If a lot of clubs that you don't usually want many - or any - players from all have 'easy'-looking fixtures in the coming gameweek, and/or many of your existing top players face unusually tough fixtures and/or are drawn against each other*, you might fancy completely revising your squad for that one week to take maximum advantage of the untypical points opportunities from this set of match-ups. 

In the past, when we only had ONE of this chip, it was always sensible to hang on to it until the latter part of the season, when we knew that we would face 2 or 3 Blank Gameweeks (at least one of them a pretty big one) because of league games being postponed to accommodate ties in the later rounds of the domestic cup competitions. 

Now that we have TWO Free Hits to use, one in each half of the season, there is more freedom in how to make use of the first one. 

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, opportunities for a 'bonus' use of the Free Hit largely overlap with the tempting Bench Boost gameweeks: sets of fixtures where there a lot of unbalanced match-ups, promising big wins and/or clean sheets, give you the best chance of getting good points from all 15 players in your squad. But it is rare to have a gameweek of fixtures where even your starting 11 are all facing such good fixtures, so using a Free Hit to fully optimize your line-up for such an inviting gameweek is also potentially very beneficial. In any unusually 'good' set of gameweek fixtures, Free Hit and Bench Boost are often interchangeably appealing options.

There is, however, still a strong case for hanging on to it, in case of possible emergencies. The winter weather in the UK seems to get fouler year by year. Last season, we saw one game get called off becaue of high winds; and several others came very close to postponement because of thick fogs or heavy snowfalls. Even though pitches are much better protected against extreme weather these days, we have seen instances where dozens of volunteers were scrambling to clear a pitch of snow only hours before a scheduled kick-off. And there is also a possibility, particularly with extremely cold, icy conditions, that simply getting to the ground - or even going out of doors, at least for more elderly people - might be thought so hazardous that a game will be called off (that seemed to be the issue with the threatened gale-force winds around Anfield last year: not the playability of the game, but general concerns about public safety). There is a very serious danger of unexpected Blank Gameweeks occurring during the coming month or two, because of extreme weather. 

And there are, of course, other types of event that might disrupt the league schedule: public transport strikes, terrorist threats, the death of the monarch. You need to feel that the possible benefits of playing the Free Hit for pure 'bonus' value are looking very strong before you sacrifice that safety net.

So, what can the Free Hit be worth? 

After the event, you can identify a fairly specific points-lift value that it gave you, though it is a bit laborious to calculate: you have to compare your Free Hit team's haul with what your regular team would have produced (bearing in mind that, without the Free Hit, you might have had to spend points on transfers in order to put out a full team, or a nearer-to-full team). 

Bear in mind, though, that this might not always capture the full 'value' of the Free Hit, since the ability to use it may have ongoing benefits beyond that particular gameweek, if you're using it as an emergency one-match rebuild. If you'd opted to get by without the chip, you might have used up transfers you didn't really want to - transfers that might have been more valuable to you later for other changes. And you might have brought in some players who didn't have much value beyond that particular gameweek when you were caught short, and thus you might have committed yourself to using further transfers to get rid of them again as soon as possible; and if you had to carry them in the team for a bit longer than you wanted to, they might have been non-optimal points-returners for you. This kind of thing also has an effective points cost which may add to the apparent points-lift you got from the chip in the gameweek in which you played it. 

I find that the Free Hit typically yields a lift of about 15-20 points (though it can be a lot more, if a Blank Gameweek has wiped out most of your starting eleven!!) - which actually makes it the most valuable of all the FPL chips.

However, since we almost never have an 'ideal' team that's fully optimized for the current set of fixtures, the Free Hit can potentially bring a substantial points-lift in almost any gameweek; the additional benefit of playing it in a gameweek with a particularly freakish set of fixtures might be little or nothing. Therefore, there's probably no harm in hanging on to the chip 'for safety's sake' until the last possible moment. At the end of the season, it can make a great 'smart bomb' to help you win one of your mini-league cups!!  But even for this first-half-of-the-season one, you could just have a bit of fun with it in Gameweek 19....

Having said that.... there are in fact some pretty tempting openings to use it as a tactical 'bonus' opportunity in the next month. I shall have a little more to say about that soon.

[* NB: Having players in your FPL team drawn against each other sometimes is unavoidable; and it's not neccesarily a terrible thing. Attacking players may still be able to pick up attacking contributions even in a game they lose. And two good defensive teams may play out a goalless draw - or at least both avoid conceding too many, and perhaps still have their defenders and keepers pick up some additional points for saves, 'defensive contributions', and bonus points. It's only where you have attackers drawn against defenders in a fixture that there's a problem, because that's a zero-sum situation: an attacker and a defender playing against each other can't both have a good game, they're taking FPL points off each other.]

[Apologies to any early visitors to this post who spotted a sentence or two of absolute nonsense in the middle of this piece. I have been sleeping badly this week, and sometimes get a little brainfogged! Hence, I had somehow interpolated a couple of observations about Wildcard rather than Free Hit use...  Now EDITED out. Sorry about that.]

How much is a Bench Boost worth?

I thought I'd better follow up on yesterday's post about calculating the value of the Triple Captain chip with a companion piece on its cousin, the other 'bonus chip', the Bench Boost.

As with the Triple Cap, FPL managers often like to self-deceive about the extent of their success in playing this chip. Because the points scored by all 15 squad players will be counted for the gameweek when this chip is in play, they will often protest that team selection "doesn't mattter" - and so contrive to accidentally-on-purpose leave some of their best players on the bench. If 'bench players' end up recording 2 or 3 - or even 4! - of their best individual scores of the week, then of course it will appear that their bench collectively produced enormous points,... and that can all be credited to a canny deployment of the Bench Boost chip, so these folks like to claim. But of course, that just ain't so.

Even if we go through the motions of trying to make a normal team selection, with the players who look likely to have the week's shakiest points prospects left on the bench, many of us may still fall prey to this idea that "it doesn't really matter" and be a bit lazy or hasty in deciding the starting eleven; even if we're not consciously stacking the bench with some of our more promising prospects, we might subconsciously be guilty of it. 

And even if, by a freak of good fortune, the 4 poorest prospects left on your bench have returned uncommonly well, contrary to your honest expectations - that isn't worth much if a lot of your starters have returned 'blanks'. The Bench Boost is indeed a reward for collective excellence, and you ought to evaluate it in terms of the overall return from all 15 players.

I follow two 'rules of thumb' for gauging the success of playing my Bench Boost:

1)  Decide my 'bench players' after the event, based on the lowest points returned from my squad (bearing in mind the 'formation rules' on eligible team selection): thus, I only count 4 of my lowest player scores as the value of the Bench Boost.

2)  Consider my squad total score against the gameweek's 'Global Average', to get an idea of how much bettter I did - if at all - than in a typical non-Bench Boost gameweek. (I typically manage around 10 points better than the 'Global Average'; in a 'good' week, around 15 or so better. So, I don't consider I've had a successful Bench Boost unless it's put me at least 25-30 points above the 'Global Average'. I'll make mental adjustments to that rough scale of comparison, based on how high-scoring or low-scoring a gameweek it was [and, of course, there will be some gameweeks where huge numbers of people are playing the Bench Boost, which complicates this calculation!]. But in most gameweeks, 15 points above 'Global Average' would probably still represent a very poor return on the Bench Boost, and 20-25 points barely adequate.)

Now, in practice, your Bench Boost is rarely going to be worth all that much - because, inevitably, you have your weakest players left on the bench. And, very often, you'll find that at least one of your squad doesn't play that week for some reason, so you'll only have 3 players (or sometimes even fewer....) contributing from your bench. Typically your bench consists of a back-up goalkeeper, a rarely-used (and perhaps ultra-cheap) 5th defender, and whoever your other 2 weakest players look likely to be on that week's fixtures. It's not a recipe for huge points!

That being the case, the Bench Boost can benefit significantly more from a Double Gameweek than the Triple Captain does: because these are players who are unlikely to produce any big returns, even minimum 'appearance points' from a second fixture will give a useful proportional boost to their total for the gameweek. However, if you follow my austere policy of only counting your lowest-returning players as comprising the value of your Bench Boost, you really need just about the entire squad to be enjoying a double-fixture (if only your usual bench players have double fixtures, they'd probably become preferred starters for that gameweek, and your 'true' bench, with only single fixtures. would probably not score quite as well) - and BIG Double Gameweeks like that don't happen any more. (The only week where we could sometimes see 12-16 Premier League teams enjoying a Double Gameweek at the same time was when FA Cup Quarter-Final participants would have their League games from that weekend all rescheduled to the same gameweek [and that didn't always happen; sometimes they were split...]. But since last season, the Premier League is suspending its match programme on the Quarter-Final weekend, so we don't get any postponements from that any more.)

This season, we've been given the novelty gimmick of a 2nd Bench Boost, only valid for the first half of the season - when there are no Double Gameweeks anyway! And as I observed in relation to the Triple Captain chip earlier in the season, now that Double Gameweeks are so few and so small, there's no reliable advantage in them any more (to be attractive possibilities for etiher type of Bonus Chip, at least one of the two fixtures for each of your players needs to be against a really easy opponent; and you have no idea if that is going to be the case until very shortly beforehand). 

It is a huge risk to wait until the last few weeks of the season on such a slim possibility of a slightly enhanced return for those chips; it's certainly not worth passing up favourable combinations of fixtures in gameweeks earlier in the season.

As I mentioned last week, it's best to stay agile and be prepared to play your Bench Boost opportunistically - any time when you feel really confident that all 15 of your squad players are going to start, and most of them, at least, are facing promising fixtures.

Of course, it also helps if you've managed to assemble a particularly strong squad, and one that is especially targeted towards the gameweek's weaker fixtures. In the past, we've generally liked to try to play the Bench Boost chip immediately following a Wildcard, so that our squad is fully optimized for form and fitness, and for the coming week's fixtures. 

Since last season, the new rule allowing us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers has effectively given us the theoretical opportunity of further 'mini-Wildcard' plays, where we could substantially remodel our squads if we've managed to save up extra transfers for a few weeks. In practice, it's incredibly difficult to save 5 FTs - and probably self-harming to try! - but being able to use even 2 or 3 transfers at once can be a significant advantage in optimizing the squad for a Bench Boost attempt. And, of course, remodelling this way, rather than with a Wildcard, enables you to make your changes right on the eve of the gameweek, thereby minimizing the risk of injuries removing some of your squad (a major hazard, if you're having to 'set up' for your Bench Boost using a Wildcard the week before).

Also, this season we have the further unnecessary gimmick of being given additional Free Transfers in Gameweek 16 (supposedly to ease the impact of players departing for AFCON; but at the moment, it's looking very unlikely that anyone will own any African players... apart from Bryan Mbeumo). The odd way this GIFT is being implemented - giving us extra Free Transfers, up to a maximum holding of 5 of them - means that, in order to best take advantage of this measure, we need to use up all of our existing Free Transfers by Gameweek 15. And if we've managed to save up quite a few of them, Gameweek 15 might then be a promising opportunity for the first Bench Boost. Or Gameweek 16, when we'll suddenly find ourselves magically in possession of another 5 Free Transfers. Or possibly even in Gameweeks 17 or 18, when we should still be reaping the advantages of those recent major rebuilds.  (FPL's needless largesse in Gameweek 16 could also be seen as giving us an additional 'mini' Free Hit in the preceding Gameweek: we could use saved Free Transfers to substantially recast our squad for one week only, undoing all of the changes again immediately with the extra transfers being given us for the start of AFCON.)   [I wrote a follow-up piece here - with a bit more detail on this issue of which gameweeks (in the first half of the current season) look most propitious for possibly playing the Bench Boost.]

However, even if you have managed to optimally 'set up' your squad to use this chip, you should consider 10-15 points - fairly counted - for your Bench Boost as adequate; anything around 20 is a very good return; and 25+ is absolutely outstanding.

But, again, as with the Triple Captain, you should temper your expectations, and realise that the chip can easily return little or nothing. If you have a dismal Bench Boost score this season,.... maybe you'll get a big one next time. That's how the game goes.

What is a Triple Captain worth?

 

There are two aspects to that question:  1)  How should you assess the points value of the Triple Captain chip?  and 2)  How many points can you expect to earn from it?

Unfortunately, if your thinking is muddled on the first part of the question (as it often seems to be in FPL-land), that prevents you forming a clear idea of what you ought to be aiming for with the chip.

People very commonly claim that their return from playing the Triple Captain is THREE times the gameweek points-haul for their chosen captain. But this is just empty bragging, or dangerous self-delusion. (People who somehow persuade themselves that the value of the chip is TWICE their captain's points-haul are even more perversely misguided in their way of looking at this!)  Of course, you should really only be interested in the points lift that the chip gives you over what you would have had without it. And you'd get the basic points haul for that player anyway. In fact, since you surely would have made him your captain anyway, you would have got twice his points-haul for the week if you hadn't played the chip. So, the additional value of the Triple Captain chip is only the basic points-haul total, not some multiple of it.

I have discussed in some detail before the issue of whether the Triple Captain chip invariably pays off better in a Double Gameweek. (Summary; it can - but usually it does not. And it's a very dangerous thing to gamble on, since Double Gameweeks are now few and small, and right at the back end of the season.)

My general advice on both types of Bonus Chip is that you have to be prepared to play them opportunistically. There can be so many swings in player and individual form over a season that you often don't know who the hottest player of the year is going to be until a streak of exceptional returns suddenly emerges,.... and you often don't know what anyone's 'easiest' fixture is going to be until shortly before it happens. You can suss out the likely most promising options some months ahead; but you need to stay flexible, and be prepared for those tentative plans to completely change. (This year, Erling Haaland is still in form, and still the only FPL player regularly producing big points returns. And it has been fairly obvious since the start of the season that his two best fixtures in the first half of the season were likely to be City's home gaines against Leeds and West Ham in Gameweeks 13 and 17. So - for once - the start-of-season provisional plan for most people hasn't changed.... yet. But a lot of people weren't prepared to risk waiting this long, when Haaland was also knocking in braces of goals against better opponents. And now there is a chance that Saka or Mbeumo might be coming into tempting form as possible alternative picks. If Haaland gets injured in the next few weeks, then there'll have to be a late change of plan.... Such things often happen.)

Of course, you hope to successfully target one of your best hauls of the season for a Triple Captain play - but it is not reasonable to expect to land on the best; it's all just too unpredictable. Almost always, in fact, your and everyone else's best haul of the season comes from some complete random that you would never have expected to produce for you - and didn't very often, so wasn't a strong bet for the TC chip. You have to focus on players who can bag very large hauls multiple times a season, and who maintain top form for extended periods. Even if they won't ultimately provide any of your very best scores of the season, they are more reliable bets to provide a good score in a particular gameweek.

You shouldn't use the chip lightly, just throw it away on impulse; you should carefully choose a week in which your best player, when he's in his best form, is facing an opponent against whom he should have an especially high chance of scoring more than one goal.

But even the most exceptional players don't return every week. Usually, in fact, they'll 'blank' at least 1 game in every 3 across the season, probably closer to 1 game in 2. And sometimes even a Mo Salah or an Erling Haaland in their hottest run of form will still manage to 'blank' against a poor side.

You have to steel yourself to accept that a Triple Captain play can return nothing - and very often does. Perhaps 1 time in 3, your Triple Captain will only produce basic 'appearance points', or even less (the annals of FPL abound with horror stories of managers who ventured their TC on a player who got injured inside 10 minutes, or missed a penalty, or received a red card....).  

You have to be grateful for any sort of return at all from the chip; and very, very grateful if your haul from it happens to break into double-digits, even narrowly. It is foolish to expect - or even to hope for - a massive dividend of 15 or 20 or 25 points. That kind of thing happens fairly rarely, and requires a very large dose of LUCK.

[I wrote a follow-up post a day or two later on how to assess the impact of your Bench Boost chip.]

Premature Chip-ulation!

 

Gameweek 10's 'Global Average' score of 65 points was the highest we've yet seen this season. (The weekly average for the 9 previous gameweeks was less than 52; it has been an extraordinarily low-scoring season so far - probably one of the worst on record, certainly the worst I can remember in the last several years.) It's still not at all a great weekly score; but it is much the best we've had so far.

One reason for that is that a few well-fancied - and recently heavily purchased - players such as Gabriel, Mateta, Guehi, Rice, and Minteh all came up with returns; as well as the inevitable Erling Haaland, of course.

But also, a surprisingly large number of people were playing a Bonus Chip this week. And those who went with a Triple Captain play on Haaland did fairly well out of it: a 13-point haul is a very reasonable return on the chip.  (Although, of course, it's some way short of an optimal outcome, since he's quite likely to complete a hatttrick at some point; and both he and a number of other players have already recorded better hauls in other games.) For most of those hazarding their Bench Boost, the chip play probably went much worse.

But really, neither of them deserved to prosper.

There just wasn't any compelling rationale for playing either of the Bonus Chips this weekend. (The Wildcard, yes, because this gameweek marked the one really major 'turn' in fixture difficulty for leading teams in this first half of the season.)  Haaland is still looking like the only player we can look to for a likelihood of fairly regular big hauls; but Bournemouth are a very tough opponent, one of the best defensive teams in the league at the moment. City's next home game is against Liverpool, who haven't been looking very solid at the back this season; and the next three after that are against two of the promoted sides and early relegation favourites West Ham; and they also have an away game against struggling Fulham in there. How can Leeds or West Ham, at home, within the next month or so, not be preferable Triple Captain 'targets' for Haaland?? 

And this Gameweek just didn't offer a good set of fixtures for a Bench Boost play. To get a good return on that chip, you need: a) a strong Bench; b) all 15 players looking certain to start; and c) almost all 15 of your squad facing an attractive fixture. This week, most of the fixtures were too close to call. Only Arsenal and Newcastle were facing obviously weaker opponents; and Newcastle managed to lose anyway. We ended up with a pretty modest total of only 27 goals and 6 clean sheets - not at all a weekend to expect bumper scores.

I understand the nervousness, the impatience, the impulse in many FPL managers to simply get the first Bonus Chips out of the way.. It is a bit discombobulating this season to be faced with an extra set of chips - for which there really is no especially useful purpose in the first half of the season. And there is a risk in waiting too long to play them. This first set of chips has to be used before the mid-point of the season at the end of December; and the crazy fixture density over the holiday season leads to more injuries and rotations, more erratic and unpredictable results - that's not a great time to be playing Bonus Chips either. But really, in the next 5 or 6 weeks, before we get into the worst of that end-of-year mayhem,... Haaland faces 3 or 4 very inviting opponents, who should all surely be better options for a Triple Captain play than Bournemouth (they might not be, in practice; but they really look like they ought to be). And Gameweeks 12, 13, 15, 16, and 17 all look like tempting opportunities for the Bench Boost.

You really ought to have A GOOD REASON for choosing to play chips when you do - something more than just "It was burning a hole in my pocket..." or "My dog told me to do it."

'Mystery Chips' - a BAD idea!

 

I mentioned yesterday that I really dislike the idea of 'Mystery Chips'. I may have been prejudiced somewhat by the truly godawful one they visited upon us in FPL this year, but.... I really think they're a bad idea in general.

Here's why:

1)  Fantasy games like this are essentially about planning. So, it is absolutely counter-productive, destructive of the purpose of the game, to introduce elements which prevent players from planning ahead. Introduce new chip ideas occasionally, if you must (I'd really much rather not, though, thank you!) - but at least tell us what they are, before the start of the competition.

2)  This idea of concealing the nature of the new chip for a while necessarily entails that it will have a shortened period of availability, only being launched part-way through the competition. And this causes intolerable congestion, possibly confounding the rest of one's chip strategy. This was ultimately my biggest gripe against FPL's novelty 'Assistant Manager' Chip last season. That only became active in Gameweek 24, so there wasn't that much time left in which to play it; and most Fantasy managers would have kept their 2nd Wildcard and their Free Hit and both the bonus chips for use in that latter part of the season as well. (In fact, the FPL case was even worse, because the new chip had a bloated three-week duration. And, moreover, an expected Double Gameweek for Liverpool was yet to have its date confirmed, and since this was likely to be a prime opportunity to use the Triple Captain chip on Mo Salah [which did indeed pay off handsomely!], nobody could play the new extended chip until they knew for sure which gameweek they had to keep free for that possible TC play.) In effect, many people found they had barely a third of the season in which to try to use up six or seven weeks of chip options. There's a similar problem here in Fantasy Club World Cup: most players will have kept all their chips (except perhaps the Wildcard, which can be worth punting on early, in the group stage), and now have to juggle using a chip in every round.

3) All chips - well, 'bonus' chips, anyway - are unnecessary gimmicks, superfluous to the basic gameplay. They merely introduce the thrill of additional uncertainty - appealing to the gambling addicts out there, but frustrating the majority of serious Fantasy managers who are only seeking a test of their judgement of teams and players. Shifting the stakes of selection decisions with chips like these creates an uneven playing field in individual Gameweeks/MatchDays: you can't really compare your score against other people's when some are playing highly valuable bonus chips and some are not. And having such rare and one-off additions to the game increases the chances that a few players will get absurdly lucky with the chips, and obtain a massive but scarcely deserved advantage from them. Double-points for the captain selection is fine, because that happens every week, and freak instances of luck, good or bad, should generally balance out over the season as a whole. Allowing people to get even more from their captain just once in the year..... is simply betting on a die-roll.

Having said all that, I don't in fact hate the new chip they've introduced in this Fantasy Club World Cup game: the 'Qualifcation Bonus' for players who make it through to the next round. If you're being smart, you should be choosing your squad based on who you think is most likely to qualify for the next round (and the one after that!), and this is - to an extent, anyway - reasonably predictable.

What I don't like about this chip is that, together with the others in the game, it makes the latter stages of the tournament overcrowded with chip options. They should have introduced the 'Qualification Bonus' to replace one of the other two bonus chips.

And 'keeping it a secret' until half-way through - WTF is the point of that?? It's just childish.

The Double Gameweek that never was....

"Double, double toil and trouble...!"

Or..... the Double Gameweek that isn't now going to be!

FPL enthusiasts have been brimming with excitement all year about the prospect of late-season Double Gameweeks - which have traditionally (though wrongly) been viewed as the best and only option for playing the bonus chips (an excitement exacerbated - and complicated! - this year by the appearance of the 'Assistant Manager' as a third bonus chip...).

But really, Double Gameweeks are only a big deal when there are a lot of teams with double-fixtures. And that would only ever happen if all, or very nearly all, of the games rescheduled from the FA Cup Quarter-Final weekend were placed in the same gameweek. Since this year, for the first time, the League programme was suspended on that weekend, and thus no fixtures were lost that week and needing to be rescheduled,.... there was never going to be a BIG Double Gameweek this season.

Yet people had still been fondly hoping that the rescheduled fixtures from the Semi-Final weekend would provide some compensation, create a Double Gameweek of some consequence.

Because the teams facing a Cup quarter-finalist or semi-finalist also lose a match in those weeks, and get a compensating double-fixture, the quarter-finals could produce up to 16 doubling teams (although, typically, at least one club from a lower league usually manages to stay in the competition that far; and occasionally some of the Cup teams may be drawn against each other in the League that week, reducing the number of teams affected by cancelled matches; in some years, only 10 or 12 teams might have got double-fixtures like this); similarly, the semi-finals can affect up to 8 teams (but in some years, only 4 or 6). In the absence of the traditional BIG Double resulting from the FA quarter-finals, everyone was pinning their hopes on a fairly big Double to come out of the semi-finals. And most years in the past, that would have fallen in Gameweek 36 or Gameweek 37.

8 teams having a double-fixture in the same gameweek would give you the chance to select an entire squad of doubling players (although it's not always worth doing: one good fixture is generally better than two tough ones, so there will almost always be some single gameweek players who will produce better returns than doublers). However, sometimes the League will assign the rearranged fixtures to different gameweeks. Heck, sometimes, even if all the games are rescheduled in the same midweek cluster, they may decide to attach the earlier ones to the preceding gameweek, and the later ones to the following gameweek - creating two small Double Gameweeks rather than one big one.

And - oh, woe! - this year, Manchester City and Aston Villa made it to the semi-finals, but were drawn to play against each other in the League that weekend, so.... only 6 teams would have a double this year, rather than 8. And the reschedulings were split over two different weeks. And then, as a final indignity, the League, in its fathomless mischievousness, decided to deem that the Forest v Brentford game was still part of the FA Semi-Final weekend (GW34), even though it had been shifted to the following Friday. and thus wouldn't get a double-fixture after all. WTF??

Oh, and for the first time that I can remember, the bulk of the fixtures were moved forwards rather than back ('anteponed') - into the preceding Gameweek. So, the much-anticipated Double Gameweek 36.... isn't going to happen.

And in the forthcoming Gameweek 33, we have only 4 doubling teams. And of those, only Arsenal (ironically, the only one of the four teams not actually in the FA Cup round) has a good double-fixture. It's not only a very small Double Gameweek, but a fairly SHIT one - with mostly middling teams and unpromising fixtures. Nothing much to get excited about at all: certainly not for the Triple Captain chip (which should have been used long since by now, anyway).

For the Bench Boost, well.... there may be some prospect for getting something out of it. In general, you wouldn't bring in doubling players unless you thought they were going to do better than single gameweek players; and thus you wouldn't expect to have any doubling players on your bench unless your entire squad had double-fixtures (which is always hard to achieve, even if there are a lot of doubling teams to choose from). However, you tend not to get that many points from defenders and keepers, so even the small lift of 2 additional 'appearance points' for a second game-start can be a significant proportional lift to them; but even with that possibility, you still might not favour them over your regular starters in those positions, even if they only have one match. Given that your bench almost invariably consists of your 4th and 5th defenders and your weakest forward or midfielder, plus the back-up keeper, it might be possible to find doublers for all or most of those slots - and legitimately claim that they still wouldn't be first-eleven choices, even with the extra game. And so your bench might be augmented slightly by the Double Gameweek. (Also, having at least a few doublers in your starting eleven as well slightly reduces your chances of having someone not play at all in the gameweek, and so drag someone off your bench as an auto-sub. That, however, is a very minor consideration.)

But really, whenever you choose to play the Bench Boost, the quality of fixtures is more important than the number of them; and even more important than that is the confidence that everyone - all 15 squad players - will start.... because if anyone is missing, your Bench Boosti s screwed.

Don't get hung up on the Double Gameweek Myth. It's not necessarily the best time to play the Bench Boost - never has been. Double Gameweek 33 looks like it could be a promising opportunity for the Bench Boost (not a great one, but better than nothing); but there may be better options for your squad - it depends on which fixtures you like most, and when you're most confident of having everybody start.

GOOD LUCK!