If Carlsberg did FPL spreadsheets....

They would probably be like mine.

Some spreadsheets simply track each team's fixtures in gameweek order.  Some incorporate fixture difficulty ratings, with the aim of identifying favourable/unfavourable sequences to assist with managers' transfer decisions.  Although, as Richard Kenny @InfernoSix showed, FDR is a very blunt instrument when it comes to assessing fixture difficulty.  And some spreadsheets even assign predicted FPL scores to players based on a wide variety of algorithms, including RMT.  Mine do many of these things and more, but probably better.

With a week of the first international break to go, I am inviting FPL managers to sign up to receive weekly first draft versions of my FPL Cheat Sheets to test-fly during the next four gameweek period between the first and second international breaks.  The first wave of test pilots will only need access Excel, but I am planning to replicate my tables on Google Sheets soon.

Managers with active wildcards might be especially interested.  Albeit they'd need to understand that the data used by my team ratings formula is currently split fifty-fifty between results from last season and this.  That said, even whilst not yet firing on all cylinders, my spreadsheets are currently outperforming other pay-as-you-go predictive algorithms I've compared them to.

How I Got Here

I first came across the concept of season tickers during my first proper FPL preseason.  I immediately liked the concept, but as my second season progressed I grew dissatisfied  with what I perceived to be the arbitrary nature of team rankings, and distrustful of how often they'd be updated to reflect new realities.  Having finished 17,394th in my second season, I believed there was plenty of scope for improvement, and so I set out to learn what I could do with my desktop excel program, which I'd never had any use for previously.

I went into my third season determined to fly solo and rely solely on my own formulations.  With no formal background in maths whatsoever, I intuited a method of calculating the offensive and defensive strengths of each team relative to all the others.  As my Excel know-how grew I had several Eureka! moments that led to my second blog (December 2015) proclaiming my first prototype of a season ticker spreadsheet based on what I would later come to understand as a crude form of xG, though I'd never heard of that concept at that point.   My spreadsheets were constantly being refined throughout that season, but I nonetheless achieved a new personal best finish of 12,599th.

Unfortunately for my average overall rank though, I cut corners the following season by substituting my homegrown variety of xG with the much less labour intensive, and more readily available, Shots On Target data.  This was considered by many FPL managers at that time to be the most important metric of all for predicting attacking returns.  See One Stat To Rule Them All for example.  My complacency and laziness proved disastrous, and I did well to finish inside the top one hundred and fifty thousand (148,327) having been still outside the top two million going into Gameweek 12.

When I first met David Wardale @DavvaWavva during the summer of 2017 to be interviewed for his excellent book about fantasy football - Wasting Your Wildcard - I was feeling very bullish about my fifth season prospects.  This wasn't the same blind optimism most players of FPL experience before the first bunting of red flags or first quiver of red arrows.  No, my optimism was based entirely on my discovery of a reliable source of xG data.  I'd done tonnes of research into the many different models used to calculate xG, and had settled on a source I trusted to take my spreadsheets to the next level.

In the course of that research into xG models, I'd been very pleased to learn that my homegrown method was almost identical to that now used by many professional sports bettors.  This was also when I learned of a concept called poisson distribution, which came to revolutionise my understanding of most likely correct scores based on my spreadsheet calculations, but more on that fishy sounding concept later.

Where I Am

When deciding where to 'invest' their money professional sports bettors use websites like FiveThirtyEight and ClubElo.  These were reckoned to be amongst the very best last season by alex b @fussbALEXperte who, apart from writing excellent articles about football and psychology, also measures the quality of football predictions.  After taking a close look at the methods and principles used by FiveThirtyEight and ClubElo I was pleased to see that they are essentially the same as mine.  Coincidentally, the latter was also credited by the aforementioned Richard Kenny as offering a more reliable barometer of teams' attacking and defending strengths than FDR.

As far as I am aware though, these sites focus on upcoming matches only, which makes perfect sense given that most of the bettors they cater for have little interest in betting on the result of league matches several weeks away.  After all, there are a multitude of variables that can change teams' future prospects in the meantime, e.g., injuries, morale, suspensions, transfers, etc.

Catering for FPL managers is a different ball game, however, as they must plan ahead to be successful.  They only have two wildcards per season and one free transfer per week, so my spreadsheets are just as focused on long-term projections about teams' forthcoming fixture runs as they are for more immediate short-term predictions.

What I Do

After each gameweek I carefully enter the expected goals scored and conceded values reported by my preferred source, for all of the matches in the latest round of fixtures, into pre-prepared cells on my spreadsheets.

These are then systematically adjusted and weighted to give every team individual values for strength in attack and defence, for both home and away.

The rationale for distinguishing between home and away form is simply that many teams approach away games differently to when playing at home, often changing their formations and personnel in the process.


The sophisticated part comes next, when I model what future adjusted and weighted spreadsheets will look like if, and admittedly it is a big if, my spreadsheets' current predictions correlate precisely with actual outcomes.  Clearly, this is never going to happen, but I do find these dynamic xG projections to be more reliable than static ones that assume the status quo will remain relevant.

The analogy I use is modern weather forecasts, and how they are based on computer simulations that evolve the state of the atmosphere forward in time using an understanding of physics and fluid dynamics.  They attempt to predict what the weather will be in the future, not what it is now.


Extrapolating from the values my spreadsheet assigns to every team allows me to do many things, including sorting teams by the predicted number of expected goals that will be scored and/or conceded over any number of future gameweeks for any range of gameweeks desired.  It also enables me to produce weekly correct score predictions.

An important distinction to make here is that what my spreadsheets predict is 'expected goals', not actual goals.  As can be observed in the match stats shown during Match Of The Day post-match interviews with club managers, these often don't correspond with each other.

Before coming to the vexed question of what the point of generating theoretical goals is if they can differ markedly from goals scored in reality, I should add that over the course of a season there's usually very little to separate the total number of goals scored in the Premier League from those expected by the xG model I use.  Last season, for instance, total expected goals for all teams only exceeded actual goals by 46, which works out as an average of under 0.1 of a goal per match per team.

Why xG?

Have you ever watched a game of football and seen the team with the biggest chances to score goals lose?  The answer is almost certainly yes, so there's your answer.  Before I started playing FPL, unfortunate events like calamitous errors by individual players, poor refereeing decisions, and unlucky deflections, were all just grist to the opinion mill.  It was only when I started recording match results onto my spreadsheets, and saw the distorting effect such simplistic data had on my team rating equations, that I came to realise all goals ought not to be accorded equal significance.

After 7 matches last season, Crystal Palace had yet to score any points or goals.  By the standard measure of actual goals they were destined to drop down into the Championship.  Clearly, they were a team who couldn't score goals, and on that basis, wouldn't score the goals needed to avoid relegation.  The Expected Goals model, however, told a different story.  One in which they were cast as merely the unlucky victim of variance who had experienced the unfairest results up until that point.  And the villain of the piece was our old friend 'standard deviation'.

Even before I came across xG on my fantasy football travels, my homegrown variety had me start Leicester's title-winning season with Vardy and Albrighton in my FPL squad (alas not Mahrez), at a time when they were very unfashionable picks.  My DIY xG spreadsheet had identified Leicester as a vastly underestimated team judging from performances during their 'great escape' the season before.  I remember well my increasing exasperation with radio and television pundits alike midway through that season as they all declared relegation for the Foxes a foregone conclusion.

These, and countless other examples besides, have led me to confidently conclude that xG gives a more accurate picture of the attacking and defending strengths and weaknesses of teams than do the Goals For and Goals Against columns in a league table.

Predictably enough though, there are still large swathes of the FPL community yet to embrace this revolutionary way of understanding football matches.  My twitter feed is still littered with uninformed commentary and misguided sarcasm, from some of the most followed twitter accounts, at the expense of the xG approach.

To my mind though, these snipers and swipers are akin to 'flat earthers' denying the earth is round.  I expect Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham wouldn't have any sympathy for these conspiracy theorists either, given that they were able to buy football clubs (Brighton Hove Albion and FC Midjylland & Brentford) with the proceeds from their xG-based sports betting operations.




    

What's The Plan?

I've been refining and perfecting my spreadsheets for several years now, and they've helped me to sub-twenty thousand finishes in three out of the last four years, the last of which was a decent 4,733rd last year.

What I've enjoyed most about letting my xG spreadsheets govern my decisions is that they often promote going against the grain of template teams, against the flow of groupthink, and against the tide of crowd wisdom.  And yet, the maverick moves I've made have generally kept me ahead of the curve.

The time and effort I put into my spreadsheets has sometimes been hinted at in screenshots I've shared on social media posts, but the time has now come for me to make them more readily available to other FPL managers.  There are four more gameweeks to go before my 2018-19 spreadsheets have enough data from the current season to dispense with data from the previous one.  Conveniently enough this period takes us up to the second international break.  With the help of feedback from my trialists I am sure to be kept busy in the meantime troubleshooting issues and ironing out wrinkles.


Another new development to be tested is the application of expected goals and assists values to individual players, rather than teams only.  Previously, I just looked at these for players from teams highlighted by my spreadsheets as being of most interest.  But I only ever did so on an ad hoc basis.  I believe a more systematic approach this time around, however, could prove a very powerful tool for prioritising transfer targets.

Towards that end, I have created a complex algorithm that takes expected goals and assists into account to calculate average expected FPL points for the next six gameweeks (see right).

What I will be providing volunteers with, however, is a much more user-friendly worksheet with easily sortable columns (see below).


The scores contained there will need to be refreshed each gameweek to reflect new data, as the rolling four gameweek window onto player form moves inexorably towards season's end.

Before each new gameweek, therefore, managers will be sent new worksheets that will supercede previous ones.

The elusive nature of form in football, however, and the sensitivity of my algorithms, means that fluctuations in my player and team ratings are inevitable, but, if my spreadsheets perform well, these should be gradual rather than volatile.

Ultimately though, my spreadsheets will not eradicate difficult decisions regarding captaincy and transfers.    They should be used alongside managers' judgement and knowledge, not instead of them.

Getting the most from my cheat sheets will depend greatly on synthesising them with managers' instincts. The onus will still be on managers to make adjustments and allowances for events like key injuries (and returns from injury), suspensions, transfers, etc., the significance of which cannot be immediately captured by my spreadsheets.

Reality check

The most common scoreline in the Premier League last season was one-one, which happened just under twelve percent of the time (11.84%).  The next most common score was one-nil (11.58%).  And then there were just as many nil-nil draws as there were two-one wins (8.42%), meaning that in just under a third of all matches (31.84%) neither team scored two goals or more.

Using a poisson distribution applet I was able to calculate that the most probable that a 1-1 scoreline could ever be is 13.533569%.  That's longer than 6/1 in fractions, but shorter than 13/2.  Accepting any odds of 6/1 or less (11/2, 5/1, 9/2, etc.) for a 1-1 score draw, therefore, would mark you out as a 'mug punter'.

The implications for successfully predicting scorelines are considerable.  Even if we find 10 matches on a football coupon that all had the highest probability of a 1-1 scoreline possible, the chances of getting at least 3 out of the 10 correct will never exceed 29.75%.

In other words, don't be calling my spreadsheets out if they only get one or two score forecasts correct each gameweek, because in  reality, achieving 3 out of 10 with any more regularity than once every three gameweeks is against the odds.

As for correctly predicting all the results of the SkySports Super 6, you will never have higher than a 0.00061% chance of winning the jackpot.  That's a one-in-one hundred and sixty two thousand, seven hundred and fifty two chance (162,751-1), in the best case scenario.  Little wonder then that I've never won it!

If you were in any doubt about the random nature of much of what happens on a football pitch, then these startling odds should help you better understand the enormity of the task faced by those trying to provide accurate predictions.

If you understand predicting scorelines is difficult, then you will realise that forecasting who will be doing the scoring and assisting can be an even more unpredictable business!  Like weather presenters assuming the weather tomorrow will correspond with that of yesterday, much of what passes for FPL punditry too often presents evidence of what has happened in recent gameweeks as incontrovertible proof of what will happen in future gameweeks.  In my experience though, such linear thinking in FPL rarely work out how we expect it to.  Hence the reason for the phenomenon of 'kneejerking'.

Health warning

Finally, I should warn all of my triallists about the dangers of dependency.  Use of spreadsheets can become seriously addictive.  Never binge drink algorithms as they can really go to your head.  They might give you dutch courage to make maverick moves that leave you with a really bad overall rank hangover.

Please drink responsibly.


Cheers!

Coley aka FPL Poker Player @barCOLEYna

3rd session chip counts are in - and Christmas has come early

Originally posted on fplpokerplayer.wordpress.com




It is often said that "history is written by the victors", but when I said in my last blog that I'll keep a diary of my FPL progress, just in case I need it for end-of-season overall winner interviews, I was joking alright!?  Well, after running good in the third session and rising through the overall ranks to a personal best of 450th, I think it's fair enough for me to say:  SHIT JUST GOT REAL!

I maintained the momentum I picked up in the second session and built my chip stack up to 699 points, and moved up 22,970 places in the overall rankings. I find myself the current Christmas Island number one, and lead the way in the Beat the General, Fplwildcards, Macmillan, and FPL Happy Hour Cup leagues, as well as my own.  I’ve still not played any of my chips and my realisable team value has risen by 0.5m up to £101.1m.  That's an inflation rate currently of just over 4.7% p.a.

What a difference a year makes.  This time last year I was languishing outside the top 2 million and still bottom of my 18 player money mini-league, which I'd run away with the season before.  The first eleven gameweeks saw my respective defenders and goalkeepers keep just 4 clean sheets between them, and my title defence resembled that of Chelsea's in 2015-16!  From GW12 onwards though, I steadily climbed the rankings and completed my 'great escape' from ignominy with a top 150 thousand ranking, good enough for a face-saving fifth place finish in my mini-league.

This time around, however, I've already banked 26 clean sheets from my defence.  Indeed, this season has seen such a turnaround in my fortunes that it's difficult to not draw parallels with Leicester City's historic 2015-16 season!

In the absence of a Claudio Ranieri* then, what can I attribute my FPL transformation to?  Two words my friends, two words:  expected and goals, a.k.a. xG.  Whereas last year my spreadsheets were dependent on Shots On Target data, this year they rely on expected goals instead.  More about my spreadsheets later.

I said in my last blog that I was going to be making more aggressive moves, and taking more gambles.  True to my word, after only taking one hit in the preceeding seven gameweeks, I took hits in three out of the next four that followed.

[*For what it's worth, I've long argued against the mainstream view that a) Ranieri deserved nearly all the credit for Leicester winning the league, and b) he'd earned the right to be relegated with them.]

Calculating the net profit or loss of transfers can be a tricky business.  I often see people declaring the success or failure of such moves based solely on points in the subsequent gameweek.  In reality though, the effects of transfers ripple across several gameweeks, and can completely rewrite our gameweek histories, as future captain/vice captain choices and benching decisions are all impacted upon by the players we buy and sell.

As the screenshot above confirms though there was little wrong with my player recruitment during the last session.  48 points profit over 4 weeks equates to a healthy average of 12 points per gameweek transfers and, but for Mo Salah's poor penalty miss in GW10, I could easily have been looking at 67 points profit at a near 17 points weekly average.

In tournament poker, your tournament life will often be put in jeopardy by opponents playing their 'draws' aggressively.  And you may find yourself 'heads up' with an opponent you re-raised pre-flop, and you may find yourself hitting 'top pair, top kicker' on the flop, and you may find yourself continuation-betting the flop, only for your opponent to then check-raise you all-in for the remainder of their stack.  And you may ask yourself, well how did I get here?

Now this is a really uncomfortable position to be in because even if you put your opponents on a 'big draw', maybe a flush and straight draw combo, you may know you're ahead and have the correct pot-odds to make the call, but you also know that a lot of the time they're going to outdraw you, and your chip-stack will take a big hit if they do.

I had much the same feeling leading up to my big 'showdown' in GW11.  The pre-flop action saw a Harry Kane raise on Thursday night, and a re-raise on Friday night.  The stakes were high.  By the time the deadline dealer 'called the clock' on me, there were more than 600,000 new Kane owners, and the all-in bet I faced was 1.4 million armbands.  I 'went into the tank' and decided before my allotted time ran out to make the call with my top player, top kicker Sergio Aguero who I transferred in to captain my team.

I already had one Kane 'blocker' in the form of Christian Eriksen, but knew that transferring in Heung Min Son would give me extra 'outs'.  I also hoped he might be able to 'counterfeit' some of the hands with Kane in them if Tottenham scored big against Crystal Palace.

For the record, I also thought about bringing in Dele Alli too, but there were several good reasons for not doing so.  Firstly, he'd played every minute of Tottenham's previous 3 matches in all competitions; secondly, there were rumours circulating beforehand that some players were going to be rested; and, thirdly, unlike Son, he had none of the ingredients you need for the perfect pre-wildcard recipe.  Namely, he did not fit the bill as a one-week-only differential punt.

Appropriately enough, given his full name is (nearly) an anagram of MINI UNSUNG HERO, my lucky number seven scored the only goal of the game, scooping me a 10 point pot in the process.  With all those captaining Kane left holding nothing but a 'busted flush', Aguero's subsequent goal was the 'rub down' they didn't need.

I'd not forgotten Kane's blank when I transferred him into my team in GW8 to captain him for the supposedly plum home fixture with Bournemouth, but there were many other reasons for going against the crowd in GW11.

Ultimately though, it boiled down to believing Aguero would outscore Kane, because my expected goals spreadsheet was predicting MCI would win 3-1 and that TOT would do so 2-0, and I reckoned Sergio's share of 3 goals would be bigger than Harry's of 2.

I said in my last blog that most of my decisions will be determined by my spreadsheets, or my 'cheat sheets' as I dubbed them, and here they were helping me to finally break into the top 1,000

My spreadsheet's team goals predictions in Gameweek 11 showed a strong positive correlation with actual team goals of +0.63 (on a scale between -1.0, the minimum, and +1.0, the maximum).

The actual scores were as follows:

Thanks to my 'cheat sheets' then, I finally achieved a long-term goal of breaking into the top 1K rankings.  The harder task now will be to remain there.  There is a tendency sometimes after taking down a huge pot in a poker tournament to want to sit the next bunch of hands out, to take it easy for a while, and to think you have the luxury of simply waiting to be dealt good hands.  This is nearly always a big mistake.





Poker has taught me to avoid being complacent.  You cannot afford to relax until you've either won the tournament or been knocked out of it.  And as I'm not ready to be knocked out of the running yet, I'd better stay focused!
 
In poker, players are responsible for protecting their hole cards.  If they 'flash' their cards then people will look.  If they don't protect their cards then it's their own fault if people exploit that advantage.  I might need to start heeding that lesson much sooner than anticipated, and start playing my FPL cards much closer to my chest when it comes to declaring my captain picks,  transfer plans, and such like.  But for now, and in the spirit of the way the game is played in the FPL community, I'll 'advertise' below the scorelines my spreadsheets predict to be the most likely for Gameweek 12.

The next session is a mammoth one, with ten levels over the next 6 weeks, before the next break in early January.  I hope you'll join me for the 5th session chip count then.  In the meantime, may the FPL flops be with you!

Coley a.k.a. FPL Poker Player @barCOLEYna

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

'advertise' refers to exposing cards in such a way as to deliberately convey an impression to opponents about the advertising player's style of play


'blocker' is one of the cards your opponent needs to complete their hand

'busted flush' is a potential flush that ultimately fails to materialise

'call the clock' is how you challenge a player for taking too long to act. Once challenged, a player has a set amount of time to make a decision. If the player fails to act in the allotted time, their hand is dead

'counterfeit' refers to situations in which a community card actually makes a player's hand less strong even after technically improving that hand

'flash' refers to a card becoming briefly exposed by accident


'outs' are any unseen cards that, if drawn, will improve a player's hand to one that is likely to win

'rub down' is a deliberate act of putting someone down

'showdown' is a situation when, if more than one player remains after the last betting round, remaining players expose and compare their hands to determine the winner

'top pair, top kicker' is when you pair the highest card on the flop with one of your hole cards, and your other card is highest possible kicker, which in most instances is an Ace, e.g., raising preflop with Ace, 10, and the flop comes 10, 4, 2.

'went into the tank' is to take a lot of time to think about the decision on how to play a hand

2nd session chip counts are in

Originally posted on fplpokerplayer.wordpress.com

Okay, so we’re about to enter the third session of the 9 month long poker tournament that is FPL, and I thought I'd make a diary entry of my promising progress so far.

This post is inspired in part by poker player Gus Hansen (left), whose book Every Hand Revealed about winning the 2007 Aussie Millions World Poker Tour main event chronicled in real time his progress from the beginning of Day 1 to the end of heads-up play on the final table via notes he spoke into a handheld recorder throughout the tournament.

On the off chance that this proves to be my year in the World Series of FPL, I figure it'll be handy to have kept a blog, because apart from anything else, it'll make answering all those questions in end of season interviews so much easier, right?

DIARY ENTRY #1

So, what's the story so far?  Well, I had a good second session, building my chip stack up to 446 points from 170, and moving up the overall rankings from 602,989 to 23,420, placing me inside the top 0.5% of entrants.  I'm yet to play any of my special chips (Bench Boost, Triple Captain, Free Hit, Wildcard), and my realisable team value is £100.6m (£101.7 at current prices).

The field is still huge, however, and there's quite a ways to go before I can start dreaming about making the 'final table'.  As ever, it'll only takes a few 'bad beats' to completely derail my attempt to go deep in this tournament.

I’ve adhered thus far to the 'tight is right' philosophy subscribed to by many successful tournament players.  That is to say I've played conservatively and avoided putting my chip stack at risk early on.  I’ve been patient with my hands and kept gambles to a minimum, with only 1 hit to date.  While others quickly lost confidence in their gameplans and ‘spewed chips' in kneejerk fashion, I held my nerve and kept faith with the strategy of waiting until I got a good read of my table.  As with poker tournaments, and the Premier League itself, you can’t win FPL in the first few weeks, but you can lose it.

Obviously it helped that unlike last season I’ve ‘run good’ early doors with regards to avoiding ‘coolers’ or 'setups' (injuries and suspensions).  That said, I've endured a couple of injuries, a couple of penalty misses (Lukaku & Vardy) and a missed tap-in (Vardy again).  Nevertheless, I've accumulated chips steadily with most of my captain picks, and 'defended my blinds' successfully with shutouts aplenty.

In fact, whereas it took me 11 gameweeks last season to muster 4 clean sheets, it only took me 4 this time around to garner 11!  Contrary to received wisdom, good defence has proved to be the best offence for me (3 goals and 5 assists) and the cornerstone of my campaign so far, with 22 clean sheets banked already, including 7 out of 7 from my goalkeepers.

HAND ANALYSIS

My progress up to now has been achieved without being dealt any of the bigger hands.  I'm yet to be dealt either of the biggest pairs (A,A or K,K), more commonly known in an FPL context as Aguero(C) or Kane(C).  Instead, my biggest gains so far have been courtesy of 'medium pairs' like the 9, 9 (a.k.a. Captain Lukaku) I rivered a goal and an assist with against Everton,small pairs' like 3,3 (a.k.a. Davies) with which I've already won three double figure pots,

 and 'small suited connectors' like the 2,3 (a.k.a. Eriksen) I made a straight flush with against Newcastle.

Probably the best hand I played though was during the 4th Level, when I made a disciplined fold with my DDG 'out-of-position' against an aggressive opponent by the name of Stoke, and played my Elliot against a passive Swansea instead.  That round of hands also saw my patience with 'suited aces', De Bruyne (ace, seven) and Kolasinac (ace, three) belatedly rewarded with a couple of small pots of 9 and 11 chips respectively.

Naturally, there have been some missteps along the way, and I've lost some pots I should have won, most notably when I gave up on my Jesus hand too easily, folding to a bluff from Guardiola in the 3rd round of betting.  Pep succeeded in putting me a little 'on tilt' thereafter, because I compounded my error by 'overplaying' Chicharito twice in the next 2 levels.

SPREADSHEETS & CHEAT SHEETS

With 7 gameweeks played, however, I now have a 'good read' on my table; my season-ticker spreadsheet table that is!  All teams have now played at least 3 games at home and 3 away, meaning I can finally dispense with last season’s numbers.  From now on my expected goals predictor will rely on adjusting and weighting this season’s results only.

To me, my spreadsheet feels like an FPL equivalent of the ‘push/fold’ chart I use when playing online poker tournaments.  Essentially, such charts tell me mathematically whether or not going all-in with a particular hand in a specific situation has positive expectation.

By the way, these 'cheat sheets' are prohibited during hands in live poker tournaments such is the advantage they are deemed to bestow.  See below for a very entertaining hand from last year's World Series Of Poker Main Event for confirmation of the saying "cheaters never prosper".

https://youtu.be/afYv3xJLTf8

For what it's worth, McConnon's chip stack was a little too large in my opinion for his chart to be relevant anyhow, but certainly he was bordering shove-or-fold territory.

Thankfully, FPL decisions don’t also have to be made in a live arena without recourse to tables, tools and spreadsheets.  For the remainder of this season then, the overwhelming majority of my FPL decisions will be governed by what my spreadsheets tell me with regards to how many goals teams are expected to score in forthcoming fixtures, as well as how many clean sheets teams are expected to keep.

With this better read on fixtures and form, my plan is to gradually widen my 'open raising range' and make more aggressive moves than hitherto in a bid to acquire a dominant position in the tournament.  The aim is to reach a powerful enough position to be able to apply 'leverage' and force opponents to worry about my captain choices and transfers, and how best to counter them, not vice the versa.

Somewhat paradoxically, I'm willing to gamble more now in the hope of  being in a position to gamble less later.  After all, it is much easier to accumulate chips from a position of strength as a big stack bullying small ones, rather than from a position of weakness as a small stack.

RECOMMENDATIONS

So then, which teams does my cheat sheet recommend folding, calling or raising with during the next few levels?  Extrapolating the likeliest scorelines over the next 6 gameweeks from my expected goals spreadsheet, I strongly suggest not attacking with hands that contain Brighton, Crystal Palace, WBA, Burnley and Huddersfield cards, and raising with ones that have Spurs, Man City, Everton and Leicester cards in them.  At this stage, Chelsea cards are surprisingly only considered okay for raising with during the next 2 rounds, and only calling with thereafter.

Hands with 'blockers' from West Ham and Man City are deemed the best with which to 'defend blinds' with over the next 6 levels, while those from Bournemouth, WBA and Watford are considered the worst, spelling trouble for Foster and/or Hegazi owners.  The prominence of West Ham on my clean sheet predictor will surprise most people, and does have the look of an outlier here, if not downright anomaly, but I hope not as I traded Hegazi in for Cresswell with my GW7 free transfer.

END OF BREAK

So there you have it, the third session is about to get underway and will consist of four more gameweek levels before the next international break takes place.  I hope you'll join me then for my next update.  In the meantime.. may the flops be with you!

Coley a.k.a. FPL Poker Player @barCOLEYna


GLOSSARY OF POKER TERMS  (FPL parallels)

bad beats  - subjective term for a hand in which a player with what appear to be strong cards nevertheless loses

blockers  - holding one of the cards your opponent needs to complete their hand (goalkeepers and defenders)


cooler  - situation in which a player holds the second best hand, so strong considering the circumstances, that they are apt to lose the maximum with it no matter how they play it (Mane red card, Aguero car crash, etc)

defending blinds  - call or raise an opponent's raise when in the big blind, rather than folding an otherwise weak hand, in order to exploit overly aggressive players (clean sheets)

final table  - last table in a multi-table poker tournament. The final table is set when a sufficient number of people have been eliminated from the tournament leaving an exact number of players to occupy one table, typically no more than ten players

good read  - expectation of what hand an opponent might have (large enough sample size of data)

leverage  - the threat of facing bigger bets on later streets, which can be enough to motivate a fold right away (forcing opponents to punt on differentials)

out-of-position  - players "have position" on opponents acting before them, and is "out of position" to opponents acting after them.  Because players act in clockwise order, players "have position" on opponents seated to their right, except when opponents have the button (away fixture) 

overplay  - to invest more money in it than it is worth

push/fold  - reducing pre-flop options to either moving all-in or folding your hand

setup  - situation where two players had no choice but to get it all in

spewing chips  - generally trying to fight for every pot, which usually doesn’t end well (jumping on and off every bandwagon and sinking ship)

Standard deviation and other perversions poker taught me about FPL

Poker mirrors FPL in many unsuspected ways.  At the heart of both games are strategies to maximise the accumulation of points.  It's just that in poker, the points are in the form of chips.  In tournament poker and FPL we have to keep in mind how our chip stack or total score is faring relative to others on our table or in our mini-league, as well as compared to those on the overall leaderboard.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of hands is as important in poker as it is with our squads in FPL.  Knowing whether a hand plays better in raised pots, heads up against single opponents say, rather than limped ones multi-way, is a little like weighing up whether transfers help or hinder our planned orientation to a 3-4-3 or 3-5-2 formation.

In poker, it's really important to strike the right balance between 'value betting' and bluffing.  Otherwise, we'll be pegged as easy-to-read, fit-or-fold type players, and we'll never get paid-off when we have a big hand.  This brings to mind the balance we need to strike between template players and differentials in FPL.  After all, it's difficult to make any headway in our mini-leagues if we've got pretty much the same team as those above us in the standings.  And, as pointed out to me by @kingsoflyon7, having too many differentials is akin to the rookie error of calling bets on the 'flop' and 'turn' chasing a 'runner runner' 'gutshot' straight draw, which relies on improbably catching perfect cards on both the turn and the river.

Another balance to strike in poker concerns the careful sizing of bets that keep as many options open to us as possible depending on what our opponents do next.  This translates to FPL in terms of the spread of player price ranges within our squad.  It is a balancing act we must perform well if we are to succeed, and relates to the proportion of our budgets we allocate to different positions within our squads.  Going uber-cheap on defence, for example, by starting the season with five 4.5m-or-under defenders runs the high risk of our squads requiring immediate surgery should the GW1 lineups feature few if any of our bargain basement buys.  Having a good balance of price ranges insures us against unforeseen circumstances such as bans and injuries.

An undeniable fact of FPL is that the so-called big hitters will sometimes blank, just like the best hands in poker (pocket aces, pocket kings) are often busted by lesser hands.  Having the best cards or players is no guarantee of success in either game.  The skill/luck quotient feels very similar, with our skill constantly being tested against our opponents' luck.  Both games involve numerous risk/reward decisions.  In neither game will perfect decisions always be rewarded.

On the contrary, they are often punished.  Like when we transfer out players who are in poor form and about to embark on difficult fixture runs.  Trading such players out for ones in good form facing easy fixtures seems like a no-brainer, but time and again, discarded players make a mockery out of the form book.

It's like making disciplined folds in a poker tournament with a marginal hand like Ace10 off-suit in early position on a high action table, only to suffer the torment of a King, Queen, Jack rainbow flop, meaning we'd have had the best hand possible (AKQJ10 for the nut straight) had we not folded.  And then we die a little more inside as two players go all-in and fail to overtake our nut straight, meaning we could have trebled our chip stack.   

Does this mean we were wrong to transfer/fold those players/hands?  Of course not.  It's simply 'standard deviation'.  Take flipping a coin 100 times.  On average you'd expect there to be 50 heads, but because of 'standard deviation', around 32% of the time there will be fewer than 45 heads or more than 55.  In other words, swings (up and down) are inevitable.  The right way to deal with downswings is to simply accept the fact that they happen, remain calm and keep playing your best game.

An understanding of probability is a key component of both games.   More often than not a player considered most likely to score a goal in a match is best priced by bookmakers at odds against to do so, meaning they deem it more likely he won't score than he will.  This weekend, for example, Jesus and Kane are currently both only even money (50/50) to score against newly promoted sides Brighton and Newcatsle

Last year's top points scorer in FPL, failed to score in 21 of the 38 games he played in, which is roughly 55% of the time.  What's more, Sanchez only provided an assist from those 21 games on 6 occasions, meaning in 15 games (39.5%) he scored no attacking points whatsoever.

Let us assume, however, that we 'know' Sanchez will score in half of the games he plays over the next 3 seasons.  It would be well within the normal distribution of goals predicted by 'standard deviation' for him to go 8 games in a row without scoring.  Especially if those are the gameweeks that I own him!  Actually, a sequence of 8 blanks in a row over the course of 100 games can be expected to occur around 17% of the time.  Likewise for 8 scoring games in a row, which naturally will happen when I don't own him!

'Tilt' is a poker term for a state of mental or emotional confusion 

or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy, 

usually resulting in the player becoming over-aggressive - Wikipedia.

Going on tilt is something that FPL players are also particularly prone to, commonly in the form of making 'rage transfers' for multiple hits, especially after low scoring gameweeks.  Playing hundreds of thousands of hands, however, has reconciled me to the harsh reality of 'downswings' being an inevitable part of poker.  Poker has taught me to be a lot more accepting of bad luck, which in turn has helped me to handle the bad beats routinely administered by FPL with more serenity than most managers are seemingly able to muster.

Planning ahead is key to being a good poker player.  There are 3 streets of betting after the pre-flop action.  Namely, flop, turn and river.  In order to run an effective 'triple barrel bluff', for example, we need to size our bets on the first 2 streets (flop and turn) in such a way so as to be able to make a big enough bet on the third (river) to discourage opponents from calling.  The mistakes novice players make often arise from not thinking ahead.  As a result, they'll fire pot-sized semi-bluffs on the flop and turn say, only to discover if they miss their draws that they only have enough chips left to bet a small fraction of the pot on the river.  This makes 'crying calls' or 'hero calls' of their bluffs so much more likely.  When I act on the flop, I do so with a clear plan for how I intend to play the next 2 streets (turn and river) also.

Carrying this mindset over to FPL means I'm always thinking two or three gameweeks ahead at the very least when making transfers.  In this way, self-inflicted predicaments can be avoided.  A good example from last season was my keeping a Spurs slot free in my squad (as well as sufficient funds in the bank*), for when Harry Kane returned from his second injury spell.  That was at a time when lots of managers already had 3 Tottenham assets in their team (predominantly drawn from Walker,

Davies, Alli, Eriksen and Son), which meant a minimum of 2 transfers would be required for them to acquire Kane.   

[*NB:  Good 'bankroll management' is essential in both games: in FPL to ensure funds are available for our marquee signings; and, in poker to avoid going bankrupt!]

FPL managers are generally reluctant to take points hits for so-called 'sideways moves' no matter how preferable an alternative player from the same team might be, and my late charge up the rankings towards the end of last season probably owed much to the significant number who stuck with Alli and Eriksen, rather than twist to Kane.  Such an aversion to sideways moves was to prove especially costly, as Kane scored a massive 71 points in the last 7 games, averaging just over 10 points per match (PPM), on his way to winning a second consecutive golden boot. 

Most of the decisions I make when playing poker are informed by the concept of 'expected value' (EV).  Essentially, I'm always asking whether or not my next actions are '+EV' or '-EV', and if my lines are the ones that extract the most value on average.  My aim, therefore, is to find the sweet spot with bet sizing and actions that make me indifferent to what my opponents do next, because in the long run these lines of play will show a profit.

In the Pot-Limit Omaha cash games I play, it's not unusual to be heads-up facing an all-in pot-sized bet on the flop, when I am 50/50 to win the hand.  Effectively, each player is getting 2/1 odds on an even money shot, so it's a +EV scenario for both.  Setting aside what has already been invested into the pot hitherto, the EV of folding to the all-in shove is zero, whereas the EV of calling is half the pot-sized bet, because the amount I win is twice as much as that I lose:  

0.5*2 + 0.5*-1 = 0.5

So if facing a $60 bet, a call would on average yield $30 profit.  Naturally, this is only in the aggregate.  It's not actually possible for me to win half the pot-sized bet on an individual call, as I can only either win 2 bets or lose 1.  Calling is clearly better than folding.  Somewhat perversely perhaps, calling in the example above is still correct even if we 'know' we only have a 40% chance of winning and are more likely to lose than win:  

0.4*2 + 0.6*-1 = 0.2

No matter how many of these 'coin flips' are lost to begin with, calling will always come out ahead in the long run.  Our friend 'standard deviation', however, ensures that the long run can be much longer than most people think.

Maximising expected value is at the core of winning at poker.  And so many decisions in FPL can be thought of as EV ones too, where we weigh up the relative pros and cons of our next moves.  We are continually faced with 'coin flip' situations in FPL.  Viewing transfer options through the prism of EV leads to more optimal play in my opinion.   

By way of example, I remember an EV decision I made with my second FPL wildcard last season, concerning which two attacking assets from Spurs to own.  Namely, whether to go (for reasons of budgetary constraints) with Kane and Son, or Alli and Eriksen, both of whom were in a rich vein of form, and a popular double up at that time.  My calculation that the expected value of the former was greater than the latter proved to be vindicated in no uncertain terms, and propelled me up the overall rankings to good effect. 

Obviously, the variables in FPL are infinitely harder to quantify than is the case with the precise probabilities that apply to poker.  The best we can do is analyse available historical data, and consider metrics like points per match (PPM), or minutes per point (MPP).  Furthermore, we can cross reference these findings with big chances (BC) and shots on target (SOT), which I deem to be the reported statistics* with the strongest correlation to future goals, and FPL points.

[*NB:  xG or Expected Goals have now begun to be reported more widely this season, and are even better indicators in my opinion.]

In the case of Kane & Son vs Alli & Eriksen, I don't have any record of my estimates at that time, but for the sake of argument, let's say my expectation was that Kane would average 9 PPM, Alli 7, Eriksen 6 and Son 5.  Such a process would lead me to conclude Kane and Son were the optimal pairing as (9+5) > (7+6).   

With hindsight we know Kane and Son averaged 10.1 and 5.7 PPM respectively, for a combined 15.8 PPM, whilst Alli and Eriksen averaged 5.3 and 6.1, for just 11.4.  My EV decision averaged 4.4 PPM more than the alternative over the last 7 games, netting me an extra 31 points overall.

Unquestionably though, 10 PPM is not sustainable by any player, but I'd argue that the lower output elsewhere merely serves to highlight that 'regression to the mean' is just as much a feature of FPL, as it is in poker, and most other places besides.

 

Now you might feel this is a case of me finding facts to fit my theory.  After all, this is the same Harry Kane who incurred the wrath of managers earlier in the season by scoring appearance points only in consecutive home matches against Burnley and Hull.  Happily for me, disproving allegations of planting and rigging the evidence, doesn't fall within the remit of this article.

Meanwhile, may the FPL flops be with you.

Coley a.k.a @barCOLEYna