I Should Be So Lucky

Great article - going to need lots of luck to get through the next two Gameweeks.

Luck plays a massive part. We have much less say than we'd like to think.

You need a HUGE amount of luck to win FPL though.

Meh.... going for my 3rd Top 200 finish in the last 4 seasons. Nothing lucky about that 😉

I think that luck plays a huge part in the game, but that it's always going to do so because football is just so unpredictable, and it (luck) makes it more exciting. I don't really have a problem with bench points/vice captains, it doesn't seem fair to me that sometimes you might not get a captain because Dzeko got injured during warmups. It would also make it to risky to play a yellow-flagged player, even if you'd like to play him if you knew he was going to start.

Very interesting article and well written . Thanks

I never have a rotation problem with my midfielders/forwards - seven attackers play every week, and an eighth man sits on the bench, coming in when needed. Its precisely because I pick attackers I'm happy to play against anyone. Many benched Siggy GW1 and Kane GW20 based on fixture... 'Luckily', I didn't. There were also people recommending I play Azpilicueta and four at the back to bench Kane that week - of course, I didn't think Kane would do quite that, but always playing the attacker due to their upside wins out long term, IMO.

good read!

I keep forgetting to check the community section for articles. They are almost always good!

FPL like poker is a combination of skill AND luck. The best poker players tend to do well year in, year out. This is achieved by playing the "Pot Odds".
Similar principles can be applied to FPL. The best players seem to do well every year.

(The Dead Team Challenge is showing us all how much is within our control, and how much really isn't...)

We're reliant on arbitrary external events. That's football - that's all sports, let's face it. I direct you to http://xkcd.com/904/ for your amusement.

We're not in control of what our players do or don't do on the pitch. We're just banking on the balance of probabilities being in our favour - a team that have hit a good run of form will continue, broadly, to score goals or keep clean sheets, and a poor team will continue to leak goals and fail to score. But every week, the basement dwellers *could* play a blinder, and the top teams *could* all have a mare. We're reliant on unpredictable external actors, which we can only hope conform to discern able patterns.

Um, I mean, like, all my good outcomes and points hauls were my skill, and all my bad weeks were just luck. Obvs.

The bench point thing is always a bugbear of mine - purely because I seldom benefit due to my tactics of trying to have a squad of nailed on players most of the time (my current Baird aberration aside) It means I get very few bench points so it feels unjust when people repeatedly rake in scores from the likes of Boyd whose hauls all coincided with benches being required by others.

Not saying it's 'lucky' or 'undeserved' as such (although Boyd's uncanny timing has to stray towards being considered luck for those that benefited), just that rule doesn't suit my style of play.

All this to say I think luck plays a bigger part for some managers than others - it comes down to how you play the game.

Great post!

I think Vice-C's and Subs add that little extra bite to the game.
Essential as they say.

Good read

I think there's an element of both here

Good planning causes good luck.

I was one of the aforementioned Moses auto-subbers last week and there's elements of both involved.

Good planning- I had a doubtful Defoe and so decided that Moses was a good enough sub to risk Defoe not playing rather than transfer him out, so Moses went first sub

Good luck Part 1 - The penalty. I was quite happy to have the assist point for winning said penalty, never expected him to take it with Walters on the pitch

Good luck Part 2 - Walcott didn't play. I nearly sold him for Ozil but didn't, which after Defoe playing caused him to come in. Had I done Walcott to Ozil I would have got 2 from Ozil and Moses would have stayed rooted to the bench

It is a great article - but I challenge anyone who says that skill overrides luck. You can diligently pick the best (or second best) player in the world to captain but don't have any control of whether he will then go and miss a 90th minute penalty and then pathetically head the rebound wide.

My view on Kane's haul is that it was not lucky to get his points, as it is a valid tactic to only have seven strong forwards. However, it do consider those who benched him to have been unlucky - as it was pretty much impossible to predict that haul, so in that situation, making a sensible decision cost people points.

Luck plays a massive part, but due to attribution bias (the belief that success is due mainly to the player's skill, but failure is due mainly to bad luck), it gets massively underplayed.

Of course there is some skill involved, but here's one way to think about the luck element - if you got everyone in Wembley stadium to flip a coin 20 times in a row, after 13 coin flips you would expect on average 10 people out of 90,000 would have flipped 13 consecutive heads. Should we treat those 10 people as experts who are skilled in the art of coin flipping?

Now extend that to 3.4m players over 38 coin flips...

Is Moses likely to start now?

Which midfielder should I go for?

a) Moses

b) Siggy

c) Downing

How much 'luck' is in this game is directly related to how much 'luck' there is in a game of football. If you believe that over a season the best team always wins then you have to assume that over an FPL season the best players also come out on top. If you think a team can fluke their way to the title then of course FPL will be the same.

For me, football is a game of skill and you'd expect the best team to win most of the time. With good planning you can expect to achieve a good finish in FPL. I think it's around 90% skill and 10% luck and I reckon you can get a top 30,000 finish even with bad luck as long as your planning (skill) is good which seems reasonable. Anything above that will be down to luck to varying degrees.

All you have to do is have a look at the hall of fame. How do you explain players finishing in the top 10 one season despite having mediocre histories?

Wisdom and Colback OUT

Creswell and Moses IN

Does that sound sensible?

haha well I can't think what is a better alternative for 5.8 midfielder

Some luck is surely needed to win but courage is possibly a more important trait, which I sadly lack. My hiding with the sheep involved getting Alexis a couple of weeks back whem my gut said get Ozil. Notice how the people up top converge with their teams and scores giving an opportunity for the brave to jump clear of the pack. Going Dzeko instead of the group favour helped last years winner jump clear with a late surge.

I think good planning puts you in the best position to get lucky.
An example of luck combined with planning was my lucky Walters hattrick. I needed a 5th mid as cover for Sanchez and week 27, so looked at which team had the best fixtures for those 2 gameweeks.
Stoke, so was going to get Moses but saw that Walters was the same price so got him instead. Ridiculously Lucky, yes, but it was planning that put me in that position.

I have to say I was expecting a bit more from this article. I was expecting it to talk about overconfidence and how people consistently fool themselves into believing that fortune is attributed to great skill while misfortune is attributed to bad luck or the failings of others. It was called attribution bias earlier but it has a more fundamental psychological name which evades me right now.

I think few will disagree that this game requires a combination of skill and luck. There's no denying that getting Kane's points were lucky - indeed Andy started by admitted his luck then accepted the result was a combination of his skill. Having been on the receiving end of this cruel twist of fate, was I less skillful in having a stronger bench available for the time when a promising striker was up against a team where he'd find little reward. And that's the tactical part. By rights, a more balanced team works better and is more resilient when key players go missing. But it also means that you leave points on the bench sometimes, or that this seasons super-sub (aka Boyd) grabs points on the occasional that your perfect-7 team misses a player.

Luck will always be there to spoil your best-laid plans. The skill comes to the fore when you learn how to deal with it. Accept the good luck and manage the bad luck. And I think it's called Confirmation Bias - same reason why 90% of drivers are better-than-average.

I think statistically luck can also be called "randomness" and football is a game full of random events. So if you are able to accept and embrace this unique character, you will be likely to be "lucky" more often.

A lot of times we try to avoid or minimize the unfavorable options, but doing so also kills the potential of being "lucky". I think unless you are certain that a player is not going to play, give him a chance to play or even hand over the armband. Trust me, doing so will make you feel so much happier, because your expectation is low. What's the worst that could happen? A 1 pointer defender or a 4 pointer captain? So? It could happen to any player. but when the underdogs do well, especially when they over perform the "favorable" ones, you will be rewarded with joy and a handsome jump in ranking.

It actually took me a LONG time to come to this realization, and last week, for the first time I followed my heart and captained David Silva.

Something I didn't mention which was a stroke of luck was how I came to owning Kane earlier than a lot of the crowd.

I had actually opted for Dzeko when City were playing Leicester, the same week that he got injured in the warm up. After this I decided to go for Kane.

In my defence though I had eyed up Kane long before the real points started coming in. I believe I tweeted and mentioned on here that "If a Spurs striker is playing week in week out for £5m then its impossible to ignore".

So while I was a bit lucky with Dzeko, I had decided a little while ago I was getting Kane at some point anyway.

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

Luck plays a bigger part in this game (and most things in life) than most people care to admit or are comfortable with.

The easiest way to demonstrate this with regard to FPL is that usually if you look through the history of the top 1k you will find many or even most have relatively poor histories.

For example, the current #1 has an OK history but really not that great for example. #2 has no top 10k finishes out of 4 attempts. Im not saying he's a bad player, but the pattern is very clear and ive noticed it every year, its the clearest proof (if you really need it) that luck plays a significant part in FPL.

Its also very revealing to check on many of the previous winners.

There is a guy in my ML who has had 4+ points off the bench 10 out of the 11 times he has had auto subs. Although you would say is could be down to good planning ,I can't see it as that.
How is it possible for him to plan to get the likes of boyd, Bruce and jags (2nd sub) off the bench on the exact week the scored points but gets them to stay on the bench almost every week they don't.