Here’s our latest FanTeam article where the FFGeek FPL Contributors League Winner and 2k overall rank finisher Sergio Torija talks about his views and plans for the FanTeam game and his first draft team for the 1 million Euro prize pool game on FanTeam
FFGeek Contributor League Winner Sergio Torija talks about FanTeam
Just to let you know I (Geek) am an affiliate of FanTeam so if you want to play sign up using this link
An Initial Look at FanTeam
Many of you will have heard already about Fanteam site, in particular about their €1,000,000 season long game. The Geek previewed this with very well in an earlier article, so I won’t bore you with the basics.
What I will share in this article are my initial thoughts based on my use of Fanteam site over the last month.
€1,000,000 Season Long Competition
I think this is the most interesting part of FanTeam for the users of our site. Fanteam’s Premier League Season game is very similar to FPL. For a breakdown of the rules, or check the Geek article.
As discussed above, while it is tricky to predict for one given game who will score, it is much more feasible to predict returns over a longer period of time. This is why some fpl managers, such as the Geek and the contributors on this website, keep coming with great fpl ranks each year.
Fanteam’s game is capped at 75,000 entries, with cash prizes for positions 1 to 5,659. The winner takes home €200,000. Up to 50th position returns at least €1,000. If I think about my last year’s FPL rank of 2,400, I am pretty sure I would have been pretty high up on Fanteam.
So this year, rather than put £20 with my mates or work league, I’ll be putting them on Fanteam game at least the hope is there to get a mega prize.
Early Draft and Tips
I would not expect my FPL and Fanteam teams to be too dissimilar, but they won’t be the same either, since there are some small pricing differences between players, and also positions, the most notable example is Aubameyang (£12.0m mid in FPL vs £11.0 fwd in Fanteam)
Therefore one strategy to explore is to find those pricing mismatches between FPL and Fanteam, targeting the players priced lower in Fanteam than FPL.
Also, my general feeling from Fanteam pricing is that they have been way more generous with the budget lot of players. As opposed to FPL, in Fanteam we can find a few solid £4.0m options in defence (Vestergard, Vinagre, Taylor), while there are also better cheap options in midfield and forward lines than in FPL.
The team I show below was my very initial draft, I am sure I will change it plenty of times between now and the start of the season. But it shows the more generous pricing than FPL. The team comes up to £99.5m in Fanteam, for a comparison, the same team would be valued at £104m in FPL.
Daily Events
Fanteam is a Daily Fantasy Sports site, this means that they originate from running one day or even one game fantasy contests. For example, in a premier league weekend, you will likely have the chance to play a 1-day event on Saturday and another on Sunday by picking players from all games on each day. They also run events for specific matches, where you just pick the players from the one game. Making multiple entries for one event is perfectly allowed.
Buy-ins to play are as low as €0,50 depending on the contest, so it has been a nice little entertainment over the last month to be playing the Europa League and Champions League events. They also run events for lots of other sports, and there are various event modes which gives a nice variety. Given all this range of options, anyone can find the event that suites them most.
Funnily enough, my better returns have come from playing the NBA playoffs daily events rather than any football event I entered. Maybe I should consider redirecting my fantasy games career towards basketball now…
Regardless, I’ll keep throwing in a couple euros here and there in specific events for fun, although you need to get very lucky to make serious money. It is just hard to predict who will score and keep a clean sheet on a one-off game. The times I got a better outcome where when I filled my team with the players from the theoretically weaker teams on show, that went on to win their respective games, e.g. I was big on Sevilla on their Europa League matches against Man United and Inter, so I could get a good result there.
Having said that, for someone who is willing to dedicate time for research and entering multiple teams to cover various possible outcomes, there can be a better chance of reward.
Hope you found this article useful, and good luck on the season long game if you decide to play
Just to let you know I (Geek) am an affiliate of FanTeam so if you want to play sign up using this link
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