As mentioned yesterday, we’re teaming up with PlayON once again for a third successive season. This year, however, we’re taking a different slant on our approach – as discussed earlier in the week, I’ll be armed with £100 for each weekly game and will be reporting back every Friday on my progress.

In addition, I’ll be publishing a midweek “Weekly Shop” article, which focuses on those players that have arrived on my radar in advance of the weekend deadline.

Most of our visitors will be familiar with PlayON by now but, if you haven’t already dabbled, PlayON has a unique scoring system that awards points beyond the usual goals, clean sheets, assists etc model. These include attacking returns, such as 100 points for creating a chance and defensive bonuses such as clearances being worth 25 points. As I’ve been playing the game the last two seasons, I’m quite used to the PlayON scoring matrix but if you’re playing for the first time be sure to have a proper look before picking players.

This season, PlayON allows unlimited teams to be entered into competitions, though many of the games have caps on the total number of entries. In free entry games, only five entries are allowed. There are four time frames available this week – these are Weekly, Saturday and Sunday Daily games and also the Monday night match.

As you’ll see in the stakes section below, I’ll be entering plenty of teams into the mix this week. It may sound like a daunting task to be picking so many squads, particularly as I may have to update them if there’s any late injury news with the deadline fast approaching. However, in practice I have established a pool of players in my head from the teams with good fixtures. It’s then a case of building teams that sometimes will only have two or three players different to another one of my squads.

Whilst I may end up scrambling around to alter a line-up if I find out Scott Sinclair has caught a cold in the warm-up, it’s rarely more than one or two players that don’t show up, and this limits the panic of finding the particular team that Sinclair happens to be in and changing him for a starter.

The Bottom Line

In future, I will be recapping the preceding Gameweek’s exploits and hopefully looking at what I’ve got right. For the opening weekend, though, I have £100 burning a hole in my PlayON pocket, so let’s get spending.

This Week’s Stake

Here I run through which contests I’ll be entering and the associated fees. This is subject to change, though; I may well enter more games but I will update the situation if that happens in the bottom line next time we cover PlayON.

Weekly – The £100 free entry game allows five teams, so I’ve entered the full quota. I have then entered two teams into the £100 guaranteed pot for a £1.10 fee and ten teams into the 25p games. I’m overlooking the £1000 guaranteed game this week, the entry is £5.50 and I don’t want to risk too much of my bankroll early on, also the other entries cover this timeframe and give plenty of opportunities to improve the pot. I’ve also created a £1.10 entry game called Fantasy Football Scout that is open to the public, too.

Daily – For the Saturday and Sunday games I’ve entered the £5.50 contests, both with £250 guaranteed pots.

Match – There’s a £100 guaranteed game on Monday night for £5.50 but, as mentioned, I’d like to build up the pot before playing too many high-stakes games. I’ve entered a one-on-one game here for £1.10 but it requires another person to match the stake before it goes live.

Total Stake: £17

As a PlayON Pro, it’s possible for you to challenge me one-on-one in all four timeframes – these games are not included in the £100 challenge and operate separately.

Finally, PlayON has also just launched their Referrals section, where you can earn 50% of the commissions generated by people you refer to the site. You can share your unique referral code in a Whatsapp group, across social media or via email and earn 50% of the commission generated by anyone that signs up to PlayON via your link.

If you’ve finished tinkering with your Fantasy Premier League team, why not enter the £100 free PlayON game this week.