Here’s our fantasy premier league strategy article where we talk you through one of the top 10 FPL managers experience this season where he stuck to his guns despite a terrible start
fantasy premier league strategy – patience is a virtue
Introduction
The FPL season is a marathon not a sprint. How you start can be no reflection of where you end and it’s never over until it’s over. Just some cliches to outline the basic premise that you can recover from bad runs and a bad start to get a reasonable rank and either win your mini league or at least get a respectable position.
This season was always going to be a tough one with new managers to the league and with 7 teams all with a chance of a Champions League place.
Alot of managers had a bad start. Some decided that they would use the season to have fun and not worry about overall rank.
Others decided that the only way to recover was to start getting in massive differentials and bet against established players.
Manager’s also decided just to knuckle down continue to try stick to their strategy and things would turn.
I’m going to focus on one manager who’s always been successful but had a terrible start. He kept the faith that he could recover and ended up with a great rank
The manager
He’s one of the top 10 FPL managers I follow and his last 3 season’s overall rank history prior to this season is 3k, 2k and 3k
His 2016/17 gameweek history
Here’s the first part up to where he hit his near rock bottom rank of 1 million.
He had 12 red arrows and 4 green arrows. Ironically he made a fairly solid GW1 with a 51k rank
That was the near bottom and after that the recovery. 13 green arrows and 7 red
The first 10 gameweeks are always difficult
A lack of data up to around 10 gameweeks makes it difficult to assess players accurately and these first rounds are always a challenge. You just have to ride them out as best as you can
There’s no need to fill your team with differentials
I’ve given a consistent message that defence, Captain picks and 1 or 2 attacking players can make a huge difference to your gameweek score. In my view there’s no need to take a high risk high reward approach by packing your team with differentials to increase your rank
A big score will come just be patient.
Often it will seem that you are treading water making no progress but the big scores will come. The day where everything goes right.
This FPL manager had 2 after he hit the low 1 million mark for the 2nd time
GW21 he moved up 288k from 940k to 652k. Everything went right
GW24 he moved up 240k from 756k to 516k. Here Lukaku scored big for him against Bournemouth. I remember his tweet “Lukaku is going to save my season”. He didn’t mention his defence which also did the business.
You’ll notice the team lineups aren’t shocking in the least. There’s no huge amount of differentials.
The DGWs and chips will also rescue you
Our manager didn’t panic into using his 2nd wildcard early. He followed the general strategy of wildcarding in GW36 bench boosting in GW37. Over those 2 game weeks he moved from 145k to 38k. A massive 107k at that late stage of the season. His scores were 92 and 173.
The double gameweek and the chips will continue to be a massive life raft until the strategy is picked up among a wider group of managers.
Final day
A GW38 finish of 98 saw him finish on 30k. A remarkable recovery.
What he did do differently was take hits
This manager doesn’t normally take a lot of hits but he did do that in this season to help him recover. I personally don’t like taking hits and believe you can recover without them. Certainly 34 points were spent well before his recovery so close to half were used to no positive rank effect.
How his story would change without them we’ll never know.
Lets compare gargatrons!
If you saw my recent article on the FFGeek FPL team finishes you’ll see that one of the analysis tools I used was the gargatron to give you some basic stats on your FPL team.
Here’s a comparison between our the FFGeek teams and the team that were studying:
What the FPL manager himself had to say
As I said above, the 1 area of risk that he took to improve his rank was hits. You can see he took alot more than me. 76 points on hit is way too rich for me and is 19 hits or a hit every 2 weeks. Now I have a very conservative playing style anyway so a comparison with me will be interesting to see how many the top FPL managers took. I know anecdotally that virtually all of them will take alot more hits than me.
The hits were often used to make sure he had the best captain. 42 points more than me were scored by his captain choices and also used more players.
He said the high bench sub score was alot to do with Capoue at the beginning of the season
Leave you recovery stories in the comments area below
I hope you found it interesting. Please leave any stories of your recovery in the comments column below
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