Hello Jonty! The simplest summary is: achievements that happened two years ago have 50% of the weight/importance as current achievements. e.g. 2015/16 has 100% weight, 2014/15 has roughy 70% weight, 2013/14 has 50% weight, whilst 2011/12 has 25% weight e.t.c

Jonty
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HoF Rating: 96.08
2015/16: 5,162
2014/15: 3,974
2013/14: 840
2012/13: 1,569
2011/12: 4,544
2010/11: 6,809
2009/10: 11,351
2008/09: 59,905
2007/08: NA
2006/07: NA

Me
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HoF Rating: 95.79
2015/16: 1,925
2014/15: 63
2013/14: 21,676
2012/13: 12,325
2011/12: 692
2010/11: 245,506
2009/10: 387,203
2008/09: 21,252
2007/08: 183,721
2006/07: 136,839

Not sure off the top of my head, but I can definitely say that it will be points that matter and not places (e.g. if you beat him by 1000 places but you finished 50,000th then that's not as good as beating him by 1000 places and you finishing... ...say 1st!!! 😉

My guess is around 20 points better over the season, might do it- but that really is just a guess!

I was literally just toying with this idea. I'm not 100% sold on Hazard as a captaincy option for gw1 so I feel Aguero is essential for captaincy gw1 (home to Sunderland is pretty hard to overlook- sorry as you are a Sunderland fan!!). But that at least gives flexibility to change him to Kane if Aguero underachieves or gets injured (or if Kane looks impressive enough that I can't ignore him as (c) for gw2.)

For me, the midfield is a minefield, trying to find good 6-7 midfielders that have good expected returns is hard so yes, I am definitely considering freeing up some cash by going Aguero, (Carroll and Grey).

I would say going without Leicester is the safest. What's interesting is the betting markets are suggesting Leicester are the 7th best team in the Prem this year and the expected goals from the Hull opener is surprisingly low (although the market isn't that well formed at the moment). The betting markets also don't think Tottenham can reproduce their excellent points total last season, although some of that must be due to the predicted resurgence of teams like Man Utd and Chelsea.

Saying this, I am playing with Mahrez in my team as he offers good captaincy options for gws 3 and 5.

So, firstly the RMT tool is due to be updated this evening/tomorrow morning now all the pre-season games are out the way.

With someone like Hazard, the model *currently* doesn't take into account things like his improved performances in the Euros and his pre-season form, however his price tag does give the model some indication of the quality he has and will push up his expected goals and assists away from his average last year.

Finally, we have the ability to manually tweak the goalscoring rates (and assist rates e.t.c) of players we think are sleepers. When doing this we can see the rates of all the other players in that team so we know that Hazard goalscoring rate should be lower than Costa's but probably the highest out of all the mids.

The ability to manually tweak these rates is particularly useful is some piece of (harder to program) information becomes available, like, say... Conte comes out and confirms that Costa is on pens. Knowing the right amount to tweak Hazard's rate based on such information requires good football understanding, which thankfully Mark and co have in abundance!

lol

*lots of liquor

https://fantasy.premierleague.com/a/entry/386/history

For. Your reference prof.

For the RMT/projections

The team model is fitted almost perfectly to betting odds.

The consequence of this is that if you believe that the betting odds are highly informative (which I do) then:

if you think RMT is over-rating a player from, say Tottenham), then there will be a player or player(s) that are undervalued by RMT from Tottenham. Currently one example of a player that I hope is undervalued is Lamela, as I'm currently toying with him in the squad.

Another example is with playing probabilities. Suppose you know that either Clichy or Kolarov will play at left-back, then if you think Kolarov is over-rated on RMT one week, then that suggests you should think Clichy is under-rated.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the numbers change with the next update tonight/tomorrow morning with all the latest team news.

Sorry, misread what this Q&A was about

I think all will be very good FPL players this year- Lamela is more of a risk but might be a risk worth taking due to his cheaper price tag.

Chelsea and Hazard was such a strange one last year- the betting markets clearly kept over-estimating them despite their poor start and underlying stats (dreadful xG from the first 6 games or so).

Personally I would mix the feeling of people on these forums with the opinions of RMT. A lot of the time people on here over-react to the most recent events but at the same time I think when the over-whelming majority of people have gone cold on a player it might be time to jump ship. This is something I learnt the hard way in the Ramsey/Yaya season, where I refused to believe their runs would continue.

The most valuable things I believe RMT gives an FPL players is:
a.) 'a feel' for the value of a transfer (in numerical terms)
b.) risks that might just be *too* punty
c.) quickly see how well your players rotate
d.) quickly see who to captain/vc and bench.
e.) an appreciation of how important fixture difficulty is (especially for defenders) and how important home advantage is
f.) a way to test many 'beliefs' about how to play the game (e.g. the vast majority of the time 3-4-3 is the suggested formation on RMT and you can see why this is numerically)

With regards Holebas and Zuniga, look out for the update tomorrow morning to see whether there is any change in this situation. The numbers should also reflect the Team News page on this site so if it looks like, as you say, Holebas is most likely to start and he is in the Team News predicted line-up, he should also be rated higher by RMT than Zuniga. (And if it's not, please do shout it on the forums, so it can be changed!)

Why is that the RMT tool suggests that Kante at Chelsea offers exceptional value, yet the overwhelming opinion on this site is that he should not be considered?

Very good question Triggy! The reason for this is that in general the players who top the FPL points ranking each year have more often than not, had an above average year. This can be in for numerous reason but probably the biggest one is that it's likely that the top points scorer will not have had any serious injuries, which the model has to take into small but significant percentage chance.

When I created RMT I decided it was best to allow players to have a short term playing probability and a long-term playing probability, which takes into account the chance of injuries/loss of form/competition for places. Those players who end up topping the charts have essentially usually managed to play more minutes than you would expect on average (say if you were to simulate the season 1000s of times) and may also have experienced above expected attacking returns.

So some of Aguero, Kane, Ibra, Lukaku, Giroud, Sturridge, Vardy, Sanchez will end up scoring 5 or 10 more or less goals than the model predicts (one may get a dreadful injury and only score a handful!) and that will end up giving them the usual around 20-25 goals that is needed to say get the golden boot.

Ha- good question Tony! I don't actually know- sorry! I will suggest one thing though, if you are considering wildcarding after 3 gws, I would suggest the 'highest scoring' team on RMT after 3 weeks may not be the absolute best to start with because it may not offer the flexibility that you need to make the most out of your two free transfers. e.g. I'm trying to make sure I have a route to Payet for gw2 or gw4 and/or Kane gw2. My gw1-6 RMT score might be higher with them in it but not if I take into account my gw1 score added to my new gw2-6 score if I bring in one of Kane or Payet gw2 and beyond.

These playing probabilities are decided primarily by Mark and they should be consistent with the predicted line-ups in the Team News section when they are updated.

RMT has not been updated for a few days now so it is likely that Bailly will go up (he was very impressive in the Community Shield!) and Jones will, as a result, go down when the next update happens. This should be tomorrow morning so have a look then.

In terms of pure improvement- Chelsea mainly because they performed so far-below expectation last year. Saying this, I'm not sure any of the Chelsea defenders are that tempting from an FPL point of view because their pricing seems to have built into them the likely renaissance of the Chelsea team.

At the other end of the table, I think the promoted teams look less leaky than usual but again the lack of 4.0 players from these teams is a bit of a turn-off. The only promoted defender I'm looking at at the moment is Friend for 4.5. Also, maybe Sunderland will tighten up this year and built on their good results at the end of last season. Kone might prove to be good value at 4.5.

I am interested in a promoted goalkeeper though as goalkeepers are much better at dealing with bad fixtures than defenders due to save points. So if it looks like Jakupovic will start on Saturday, he will be in my team with (probably) Foster.

I seem to remember FFS did a survey of people who listened to the Scoutcast- I think at the time RMT was used by less people but maybe now more people use RMT, it might be fun to do it again. I'd definitely be keen if I can find the time!

Hi Rama, it's great to hear from you!

RMT takes a lot of time each week to keep it up to date as things are always changing. There are three things that gradually change over the course of the season; 1.) players' probabilities of playing, 2.) players' rates of scoring, assisting, e.t.c. and 3.) overall team attack and defence parameters.

With 1.) (playing probabilities) I think we do a fantastic job- especially if you look at RMT on the main decision night (Friday evening).

With 2.) (players' rates of scoring, assisting e.t.c) I have thought has often been the one area we are weaker on. It is interesting to hear that you think this too. When I first set up the model, I used a more simplistic (but still very good model) to quickly approximate rates for all things, goal-scoring, assists, yellows, reds, bonus, ogs. For example the ogs model is just very simple (defenders have the highest og rates, strikers have the lowest) and this is fitted properly to historical data. The goalscoring model is more complicated. Early on, I decided that there were too many instances were something very hard to programme had happened. (Maybe Lampard was injured, so Drogba was now on pens or even harder to program, someone was now playing OOP) so I gave the updater the ability to manually edit the rates.

As far I am aware we aim to update these every few weeks and often we do but I would agree with you that sometimes RMT is slow to react to short-term shifts to scoring rates.

With 3.), I update team parameters and whilst I would like to update these every week, I sometimes only get round to doing it every month or so. Thankfully, teams generally are much slower to change than players so usually we're never significantly far out from what the market is suggesting when I come to update the model.

The watchlist is a separate thing to RMT, which seems to updated very regularly, but I also agree that it should tally with what RMT suggests.

With all these things, it takes lots of time to update the model. Hearing people using RMT and finding it useful is really great to hear and gives me more motivation to make sure it is as good as it can possibly be! 🙂

Hi Rvaz- it looks like yours is the last message. I hope you're still around to read my reply- sorry it's taken so long to get to you.

When I first built RMT I had it on my own website and had to learn HTML and PHP on the fly to do it. It's been around 5 years since I last personally did any HTML/PHP coding so I would probably find it very time-consuming to edit the code and make those changes.

However, there has been talk of FFS re-writing the RMT code from scratch so that it is much easier for a coder to add in new suggestions like the one you make. Currently, I don't think it's high up on the priority list for the site, but we'll see...

However, as long as you're happy to work in different windows, you can do what you want, if I haven't misunderstood what you are asking. You can use the 'First gameweek' and 'Last gameweek' drop downs and use shift on your keyboard to open up a different window which views your team over a different period- then change which weeks you're looking at. I have a feeling I haven't quite understood what you were after though?