Happy New Year From Fantasy Football Scout

Makes perfect sense tbh (and I used my free hit around GW12)

First season taking FPL seriously... ya live and ya learn

Too short, didn’t read

+1

Absolutely 100% spot on. Every time I see anyone try explain their early use of the Free Hit, I'm baffled. This seems so obvious. There are no amount of points gained this GW (or any other so far this season) that will make it the 'right' decision. It must be saved for true chaos. We've seen nothing yet.

The only other factor to keep in mind though late in the season is using the WC the week before a BB which might effect the choice of the FH use as only 1 chip can be used at once. I.e. all a bit of an unknown

What about gw28? I saw on reddit 4 of the big 6 teams may have a blank fixture that gameweek

Poorly thought through and the wrong conclusion. Otherwise a great post. 😉

Ogbana Hattie would be a delight!

The best time to play the free hit is the week you are mostly likely to gain high points relative to your current team, and relative to everyone else. This could be the blank week as you explained, or it could be this week if you have several players not playing due to injury/rotation or have bad fixtures.

Cheers. This settled the 30% of my thoughts to play the free hit this week. - 4 Hit taken 🙂

A largely ridiculous analogy from start to finish

How has this nonsense been hulked? Just let people play the game and stop trying to make them feel like idiots for decisions based on many variables.

As you were.

Hmm with a team decimated by injuries and rotation over the Christmas period my DGW planning went out of the window. Given the fixtures, I fancy maximising Spurs, West Ham and Mam City players this week and then sorting my team out with a WC.
Is it the best long term strategy or short term tactic? Who knows until the games are played. I just know that I’m losing interest in this season as I’ve made some horrendous decisions and I’m close to giving up on the game. Essentially this is a last hurrah for me that may or may not work.

Here's the thing I think you've overlooked, if you save your free hit for a blank gwk then all you can likely do is load up in a substandard set of fixtures (potentially really quite bad) and hence not the best scoring players.

From an optimisation point of view its very probably better to try and maximise the upsides - ie extra fixtures and good teams playing with good fixtures. (basically you just have to accept the bad week with minimal fixtures)

A good analogy would be that of a taxi driver working many hours on a slow day to get to his daily 'target' but knocking off early on a good day because he's already met his target. Statistically speaking he's better off working longer on the 'good' days to maximise his income.

Now, we dont know what other doubles will come, but this one is here and represents a reasonable opportunity all things considered.

totally correct conclusion

Free hit for the win..

for me is great moment, with kaku,salah kdb i naughton on board, and without any spurs (i made kane->firmono for one GW). probably i will suffer in bgw, but i will suffer in dwk22 anyway, so

In theory, it's the right decision to play the FH-chip in one of the blank gameweeks. But you can't plan everything in FPL. My original plan was to play the FH-chip when the quarter-finals were played, but with the current state of my team I believe I will get more points from this chip this week.

I would probably have to do a -12 to field 11 players this week, and most of my remaining team play difficult mathces. In addition, some of my players will be back for GW23 and I want to keep that team. With 6 DGW-players and 6 players with easy fixtures and the 3 cheapest players I can find, the difference between points gained will be bigger this week (including the -12) than the difference between fielding 5 and 11 players in another gameweek. And that is what the game is all about, to get maximum points out of the players and chips, isn't it?

I think the main reason for not playing it this week is the fixture congestion which makes selecting a decent 11 that will definitely play almost impossible.

A week with bigger teams blanking will be easier to make use of the free hit

Amen Brother

I forgot about this, then couldn’t cancel the free hit...

Blank gw is rubbish filled always with Bournemouth & West Brom junk. Have hopped on FH this week with Aguero, 3 spurs, 3 city, 3 west ham, Kane captain & Eriksen VC. Playing safe wins nothing, 11 two’s in a blank is still a hopeless score

(also posted within thread)

my mate played his free hit this week "wrongly" in your eyes

his original team has...

Ake, Dann, Tark, Hunmeiner
Salah, Coutinho, KDB
Vardy, Firmino, Jesus

TEN players missing this game week

of which 7 will likely be back for the game week after

yes this is an extreme example, although I assure you it's a genuine one

but you're suggesting he should have taken a 32 point hit to field an 11 this week?

I'm all ears

Do you have that stats for how many FH chips have been played and how many of those was this week?

This was the best week so far this season - there might be better "possible" opportunities but some people but get tempted to use their FH between then and now

I'd argue this week is pretty similar to a blank week ... where are Vardy, Firmino, Salah, Coutinho and who else misses?

This week met a lot of the criteria that you mentioned .. I have not spend any hits preparing for this week, had a lot of players who were questionable or had dodgy fixtures and the players playing this week are ones which I generally don't want in my team

Excellent post.

"generally" good analysis, and I would most probably be taking the same decision.

Other than that, analytical and statistical discrepancies exist. Lots of them. Take some below actual/hypothetical examples.

- One of my colleagues has 9 injuries/absences in their team
- Another already used their FH some GWs back for a stupid reason. They managed to bag 48 points above what their normal team would have (incremental points). Having said that, it ALL depends on how many incremental points you would gain using the FH, a gain of 48+ would be a better investment, a gain of 48- would be worse. Now all this dude has to do is field their team for GW 31, field an imaginary team, calculate both points, and see if the difference was 48 to see if it really was a good investment. A good variance and standard deviation exercise would help.
- You are making it inevitable that the best gains are on GW 31.
- Although I agree with this theory (mainly because it works with MY long term strategy), I can in no way call it conclusive; it has MANY fallacies.

- Oh and one last thing, statically, it all comes down to how many points you make, compared to what YOU WOULD HAVE (and consequently to your overall total), not compared to others. "others"are indirectly accounted for when comparing to self.

example:

I scored 30 points on GW 30, and 20 points on GW 31
Jim scored 50 points on GW 30, and 40 points on GW 31
The difference is 40 points, in conclusion, it really does NOT matter what he scores on any particular GW that i chose to use a chip on, what matters is how many points I make, to close the overall point gap of 40.