FPL Mangers Treating First WildCard Like A Reload In A Poker Tournament

Seems like this season's first bandwagon is the GW3 WildCard Plan.  It's catching on like wildfire, and leaving me feeling somewhat bemused by how quickly the consensus can change from preaching delayed gratification last season to advocating immediate gratification this.

Some of the data put forward to support this groupthink strikes me as manipulating stats to suit your purpose.  I think the methodology of comparing the number of price fallers versus price risers, particularly in the early weeks of a season, and the aggregate value lost against that gained is too simplistic.  Such analysis is not nuanced enough to take into account the full range of reasons behind market volatility early on.  

Consider, for example, how many casual players are caught out by their selections not getting gametime in the first couple of weeks.  My hunch is they'd account for a sizeable proportion of players dropping value.

The gung-ho attitude I'm observing towards WC1 reminds me of the only live poker tournament I played last year.  It was a reload tournament costing £30 to enter, with the option of paying another £30 for an extra starting stack worth of chips anytime during the first couple of hours.  

I found that this reload option made many players far more liberal with their gambles than they usually are in tournaments where there are no second chances.  At the end of the reload period, all players with their option still intact were invited to top up their stacks.  

Nearly all the remaining players did so, but I declined as I was happy enough with my above average stack.

And as it happened, I finished 4th out of 82, and picked up £425.  By not reloading I'd won 14 times my buy-in, instead of only 7 times had I reloaded.  Obviously, I'll never know if I'd have won more with an additional outlay, but my feeling was it made little difference.

My point here is that, in the same way people played fast and loose with their starting stacks, because they could always reload if things didn't go well in the early stages, many FPL managers are being too short-term in their thinking about playing an early WildCard.  It's like they're treating the first couple of gameweeks as a freeroll, with nothing lost if they don't get off to a good start.  

Just to be clear, I'm not against playing WC1 early.  By all means do so if circumstances dictate it.  I'd have reloaded in my poker tournament too if my stack had been decimated early on. 

As so often with FPL, the sample size in this debate is too small to be meaningful.  And stats only tell us what has happened in the past, not what will happen in the future.  It's not possible to know in advance when our WC1 will prove most useful.  

To actively plan to dispense with it less than a sixth of the way through the first half of the season, though, potentially THIRTY gameweeks before playing WC2, seems unnecessarily loose-aggressive to this poker player.