Scoutcast Episode 297 – Patience

Surely B silva holds down a spot right?

If not move to pogba?

Pope.
TAA. Stones. Digne. Rico.
Salah (c). Sterling. Fraser. Ayoze perez.
Kane. King.

Sub: Button. Lundstram. Dendocker. Greenwood.

0.0 in bnk and 1 ft.

GTG....?? or any changes...??

Looking at my team Callum Wilson feels a horrible pick, not sure I've ever had him when he's scored well.

It seems like a lot of people here do not understand basics on playing games of statistics and probabilities: People talk as if the coming weeks will show what was the right decisions. That is not true, what is the right decision to do right now does not depend on what in hindsight actually happened, but what the probabilities/expected values of return are right now.

For instance, for a player like Martial I would estimate what will happen over the next 8 gameweeks something like:

A (10%) Martial scores a lot, rises a lot and is almost essential to have
B (30%) Martial scores as much as the best players in his pricerange and is a very good player to have
C (30%) Martial scores every now and then, but worse than the best similarly priced players
D (20%) Martial doesn't score much at all and is definitively a waste of money compared to similarly priced players
E (10%) Martial gets injured/red card/other reason so he needs to be sold

Similarly you could make a list for Rashford and then compare who gives highest expected value. If I, for the sake of the argument, think that Martial is the better choice, then this claim is not disproved even if Rashford ends up scoring double the points of Martial. Of course, it might be true that I wrongly estimated the probabilies, and that Rashford was actually the better pick. However, it might just as well be that luck wasn't on my side. We also know very well that humans are psychologically inclined to come up with ad hoc explanations which justify why something happend, after the fact. So even when I was just unlucky, my brain will naturally come up with wrong explanations for why I should have known that Rashford was the better pick. In many cases, my choice of Martial (assuming I am a good fpl player) was probably correct in the first place.

On here it seems like a lot of people would go "Ha! I knew that would happen, I am so good." if A happens, and you picked Martial. But that is obviously not true, everyone knows it is a possibility, but it is still lucky that it goes that well. Similarly a lot of people seem to think that when D or E happens, they obviously should have known in advance that would happen and where stupid to pick the player. One cannot divide the cases like that, every player has a risk and a reward, and in any single case there is a lot of luck involved, both the positives and negatives.

Any Watford fans or anyone know if it is like Watford change formation this week and play Del Boy as a striker? Or just bite the bullet and jump on the Pukki partay? Especially giving these erratic price changes.. Thanks!

Define a casual player

Regarding the prices changes, does anyone else think some of the prices were meant to be risen ages ago e.g Ederson but fpl have just got their act together in regards to glitches and just managed to change the prices last night and the algorithm actually hasn't changed that much?

its classic FFS thinking for Cherries assets to be written off based on one game of football at the very start of the season. suddenly every bournemouth player is a horrible pick as if you were entitled to a haul just because you had them

After all the KDB pre-season hype I just realised Mahrez got 3 assists! Is he nailed with Sane out?

What's the prize for winning FPL?
#ThisYearIsOurYear

Thanks for the tips.
Hearing is nearly back to normal.
Medicinal olive oil for the win.

70 points this week, very meh.

Moura Martial Bilva Salah Dendoncker
Jota Auba King

Any need to use the FT? Surely Bilva will play vs Spurs

Was any site close to predicting the price rises last night?

no transfer ban for City because they 'admitted it'.

aw, bless.

is the Transfers and Finance option not available this season?

used to be able to see how many transfers rivals have made before start of GW

Hopefully Alissons price continues to drop, could be useful in the future

3 FPL Strategies

The Turtle Pension Fund Strategy
FPL has a large number of well-established influencers. They're players with excellent finishing places over several years. Looking at the consistency of their historical data, we can reasonably expect these players will continue posting excellent overall scores. As a result, they are quite rightly given a high degree of credibility within the FPL community. When these players say they are looking at or avoiding individual players, seasoned FPL players should carefully consider their recommendations.

Think of it like this; you have a meeting with your financial advisor (FPL influencers) regarding your pension (total points scored). You state that you would like a portfolio (your 15 players) which will deliver consistent returns (the template team) against the market (casuals & other players).

This strategy suits the majority of players as they're effectively guaranteeing themselves a solid start.

The Hare Pension Fund Strategy
Similar to Turtle strategy in that it's mostly made up of template players. However, in early game weeks, we have an opportunity to be more aggressive with our investments (transfers) as the overall risk to our long term future isn't excessive. We could look at combining our FTSE 100 (Salah, Kane, etc.) and FTSE 250s (De Bruyne, Son, etc.) with more AIM (Siggy, Zaha, etc.) and for the aggressive investor, startups (Pukki, Lundstram etc.). From time to time, we can expect to see a unicorn such as Uber appear (AWB last season).

As the start of the season is somewhat more unpredictable than latter parts of the season, punting on players like Pukki could prove fruitful. He's a relatively safe option as he's nailed on to play. Should it go brilliantly well, other investors will flock to this stock and mitigate the long term risk of your holding. Should it all go wrong, alternatives such as King & Jota probably won't have racked up enormous scores.

This strategy suits the slightly more risk-tolerant who are happy to hold 1 or 2 early punts with limited up/downside.

Both pension fund strategies result in the player ending up with a template team (within a couple of minor transfers), which will sit at a relatively steady rank until the last game weeks when differential picks start to become more frequent.

Maverick Strategy
This strategy flies in the face of the majority of experts and is unlikely to pick a remotely template team. They'll most likely lack one of Salah or Sterling. If they've decided to go for a second big hitter, we're likely to see Kane or Auba in their sides.

The aggressive approach means the player needs to be highly tolerant to risk. As we saw last weekend, not having both Salah & Sterling comes with a tremendous downside. Not all is lost for this type of strategy. They're likely to have increased flexibility in their squads and moving to say Martial or Rashford may be significantly more manageable for them. Keep an eye on their knees.

Ultimately, the maverick strategy is the most challenging as the FPL influencers are unlikely to be talking about moves similar to the ones the maverick needs to make. They'll need to do a lot of their own research and be self-critical of their thought process, not an easy thing to do. Perhaps the most challenging part of this strategy will be the up and down nature of their rank. When a template big hitter does well, this strategy is particularly vulnerable and vice versa.

Pope owners...

Are you sticking for the next 3 weeks or moving on to Heaton/Ryan?

Save FT?
Pope
Robertson - VVD - Digne - Kelly
Salah - Sterling(C) - KDB - Perez
Wilson - Jota
( 4 / Rico / Dendoncker / 4)

Feel like 1 week isn't enough to warrant transfers and going into gw3 with a mini wc could be handy

Fraser > Zaha
Ings > Pukki

I really hope Chris Wood pulls something out of the bag this weekend.

Good evening gents!

Here are my picks for this season's EPL campaign:

1. Man City
2. Liverpool
3. Spurs
4. Arsenal
5. Man Utd
6. Chelsea
7. Everton
8. West Ham
9. Wolves
10. Leicester City
11. Watford
12. Crystal Palace
13. Bournemouth
14. Newcastle
15. Burnley
16. Southampton
17. Aston Villa
18. Brighton
19. Sheffield Utd
20. Norwich

Let's see how wrong I am when it's all said and done 😉 Cheers!

Are there any teams that you're keeping an eye on for when their fixtures turn for the better? I'm thinking teams like Burnley that hit a good patch of fixtures from GW5 onward?

Will Christensen and Rudiger be Lampard's preferred centre backs?

If Wilson and Fraser haul v Villa, and Man Utd blank at Wolves, the bandwagon tears will taste like amber nectar.

Anyone else noticed that you can no longer see the number of GW transfers made by your Mini League opponents on the FPL site on their points/team page this season?...That's a tricky little change. Usually I check this to see if someone has made a change/taken a hit or kept their FT on a given GW....now we're all completely in the dark...

Any Walker Peters owners about? What's your plan this week? I was going to trade for Zouma, but have firmly parked that idea now. Can either start, or bench and play Lundstram but I have Wilson up against him...

Funny how the same things happen every year...

Here I am in the corner with my pipe...

Play Zinch or Lundstram?