Zero-Sum Game That’s because Fantasy Football is a zero-sum game. In other words, the gain or loss of the participants involved is equally balanced by the gain or loss of the other participants in the game. Of course, FPL involves a lot of participants, but the principles of mastering a zero-sum game remain exactly the same. The fundamental basis of winning in a zero-sum game is to predict what your opponent does in order to choose the best corresponding option for yourself. As there are so many opponents, the task is to predict what the majority of those opponents will do. Therefore, selecting riskier choices can often be beneficial because other FPL players tend to go for safer fantasy players. It may sound obvious, but if the majority of FPL players pick safe fantasy players, it stands to reason that going with riskier choices will often have a better pay-off, for a (usually) lower cost. By using ownership statistics to our advantage, we can make this a lot easier.
Mastering Ownership Percentages Whilst it’s not the most talked about subject in the game, it’s important to understand how you can use ownership percentages when making almost any decision within FPL. If you were to take a full season and condense it into just one gameweek, when selecting your team you would identify who the high ownership players and captaincy options are, and then adopt a strategy of stick or twist. Sticking would involve blocking the majority by also selecting a high ownership player, whilst twisting would instead mean gambling on a low ownership player who you think has the potential to score higher. Identifying which high ownership players to stick and twist on is obviously no easy task, and requires an equal measure of luck and foresight. Our tactics to deal with this differ depending on when in the season we’re employing them. In the early stages of the season it’s more important to hold high ownership fantasy assets as it ensures you rise and fall with the majority and also build some important team value. Ignoring highly owned players in the early stages of the FPL game will be counter productive and isn’t an advisable strategy. As the season progresses, however, managers are faced with a dilemma. How do you avoid creating a template team without disowning your highly owned assets? After all, you eventually need to differentiate your FPL squad with lower ownership players who are risky but come with a good upside. With a quarter of the season remaining, now is a good time to move towards this. I’m not suggesting that you should completely fill your fantasy squad with low ownership players, rather that you look towards a more equal spread of low and high ownership. As I established earlier, this also helps us to reduce negative variance too. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule. If you’re top of your mini-league, then a conservative and perhaps superior tactic would be to continue blocking your opposition by sticking with a high percentage of high ownership players. It all depends on your priorities. For example, let’s imagine you project Player A (5% ownership) to get 24 points and Player B (22% ownership) to get 24 points too. In the long run, Player A with a low ownership will
help to vary your lineup and move you toward a higher overall rank, and up your mini-league too. Another concept, that of recency bias, comes into play here. Recency bias stipulates that managers are more likely to base a player’s form on the most recent set of fixtures, as opposed to a larger scale of matches that would be more reflective of their true value. Colloquially, we might call this knee-jerking! Avoiding recency bias is not easy, but crucial for long-term success in FPL. Making contrarian judgements like this is a valuable skill that develops through time and experience of the game. A contrarian move would be to avoid recency bias by selecting a low ownership player who has flown under the radar. Let’s look at an example to illustrate how we can make contrarian decisions to capitalise on the “wisdom” of the crowd. In Gameweek 27, due to Manchester City having a double gameweek, their players were popular fantasy picks. Applying the strategy we’ve just outlined, the contrarian choice was to pick Stoke City players - who also had a DGW themselves but cost just a fraction when compared to City players. As we now know, it was the Stoke players - particularly the defenders - who triumphed over the course of the DGW. They, despite our best judgement, would’ve been the better picks. Game theory exploits the tendencies of human nature and rewards those who go against their natural inclinations in order to counter the majority strategy.
An Uncertain World Sample sizes are small in FPL, player statistics and their value can be exaggerated by one or two fluke plays. There are only 38 games in a season (compared to 162 for baseball and 82 for basketball, for example), so there aren’t as many games to allow statistics to even out across a longer time-frame. We also have to contend with imperfect information, such as false injury rumours or fictional internal club disputes, which further cloud our judgement when trying to make informed decisions. In Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, Taleb argues that, since we live in an extremely uncertain world, individuals need to make their professional and personal lives not only less vulnerable to randomness and chaos, but intentionally positioned to take advantage of it. Taleb writes, “some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” In fantasy NFL, Professor Taleb’s idea of fragility to volatility and external shocks were noted around 2013 when forming a new NFL fantasy approach called “Zero RB”. Some NFL fantasy managers, recognising that injuries were the big external shock in NFL fantasy and that running backs were more at risk from them, chose to avoid the position altogether while drafting NFL fantasy picks. FPL managers can also apply Taleb’s concept of “antifragility” to make gains from disorder. By using a contrarian strategy that considers player ownership and our own natural biases, we can put ourselves in a position to capitalise from the disorder and unpredictability that football, as a sport, is so loved for. Ultimately, things will always get chaotic for FPL managers. With popular fantasy choices picking up injuries, suspensions or simply underachieving, disorder is inevitable. The question we must ask ourselves is how we can be in a position to gain an immediate and significant edge as a result of this disorder. Game theory, it appears, is the answer.
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