To Hit, Or Not To Hit?

Resident FPL writer and engineer by trade @trevg1977 asks the question: “Can an aversion to taking points hits be a hindrance to FPL success?”

Introduction

Points hits, a ‘marmite’ topic that will often divide opinion amongst seasoned FPL managers. Some party animals love a good -4 and even reach the giddy heights of -12 or even -16 at some point most seasons – others are decidedly more miserly with their hard earned points, only sacrificing 4 of them in the direst of emergencies.

What has really prompted me to write this article for the Fantasy Football Pundits is what I’ve noticed lately as a pretty widespread school of thought that taking hits is a thing to be avoided like the proverbial plague, and that never taking a hit is almost a badge of honour.

Venture into most FPL forums or twitter conversation and resolutions or rules to take less hits, take no hits even, form a good proportion of many people’s good intentions for the season ahead. Preseason this year an otherwise excellent beginners guide to FPL strategy on one website contained the heading “DO NOT TAKE POINTS HITS!” (exclamation marks and block caps and all).

As a general proponent of flexibility and critical thinking being king in this game, and certainly preferable to blindly following rules of thumb (or on occasion misconceptions and myths), I can’t resist having a closer look at these attitudes to see if there is any substance to points hit phobia.

The Research

So how to analysis this with some kind of objective data? As you may have seen I put out a call on twitter before the season started for managers sad enough…cough….sorry, organised enough, to have a screen shot or other record of their 2015/16 season to give me two simple pieces of information, final season rank and number of hits taken.

Through this exercise I have gathered over 70 data points, not a huge amount but enough to be a reasonable sample size to analyse for trends and points of interest.

Firstly, I should qualify the analysis by noting a few things about the data received. By the nature of where it was requested it is obviously biased towards more serious, and probably more smartypants group of managers – the kind of FPL geeks who screenshot their season history in fact! But that is no harm as (a) that demographic are the same geeky bunch likely to appreciate an article like this, and (b) if we really want to see if the attitude to points hits has an impact on ranking it probably better to focus on more serious players.

I did get one set of 20 players from a single mini league and these managed to give some balance by including some ranks upwards of 1m.

Finally, I am obviously aware that much more than the number of hits affects the outcome of one’s season, and that FPL managers have a variety of different strategies, knowledge and skills, as well as the luck factor of course. And so while I am looking specifically and the hits taken by these managers in comparison to their rank, the findings are only indicative of trends rather than being presented as some sort of direct conclusion. (That bit is just to ward off those of a pedantic nature who may get hot and bothered at the lack of analysis of those other factors).

The Sexy Charts

So what am I going to do with all this info?? Why make some funky charts in Excel of course!! And assuming that revelation has you so excited you are struggling to maintain control of your bodily functions, I won’t delay any further – here they are.

Firstly a scatter chart of all the results simply showing a plot of final rank in 2015/16 along the bottom, vs. the total number of hits taken. (Note when I say ‘hits’ throughout the article I mean an extra transfer incurring a -4, so an 8 point hit is two hits etc.).

So what does this all indicate? Well nothing conclusive, but that is kind of what I was expecting.

All but one hardy soul among the managers who responded took hits at some stage. In fact they took quite a lot of hits. Only 17% of the sample took 5 hits or less 50% took between 6 and 15 hits, 33% took more than 16 hits, with the max being two outliers who took more than 50 hits (-200 points) – and yet one of those party animals managed a quite respectable rank of around 230k.

For the reasons outlined in the introduction the majority of the data points are clustered on the left, primarily inside the 200k mark. I will look in more detail at this range in another chart (contain your excitement, it will be along momentarily!). But even a quick look here shows no real concentration of the data points around any common number of hits. The range is between zero and 26 hits (-104 points) and the holder of the latter figure ranked a more than decent 11k at the end of it all!

As the ranks increase towards the 1m the number of hits actually tails off, only 3 of the 10 data points in the 800k and upwards range took more than 15 hits. However this is probably indicative of these guys perhaps playing less seriously, making less hits but possibly paying less attention to transfers, deadlines and perhaps to the game in general as they become zombies.

We then have 6 managers ranked between 300k and 800k who took between 15 and 50 hits. No particular pattern, nothing to see here, move along. Although perhaps noting that the guy who took the 50+ hits is the best ranked of these six!!

So, lets move swiftly on to look at the business end of the rankings, from 200k downwards where more than 70% (52 managers) of the data comes from. A similar chart, but just zooming in on this range is shown below.

Again, due to the high standard of those who provided data, the points are concentrated to the left. Of this group within 200k ranking, 77% of them (or 40 managers) were top 50k finishers and almost 30% made the top 10k. Perhaps those who had poorer seasons were less inclined to record them for posterity with a screen shot, or if they did were less inclined to share them!

Again, in this rank range I cannot see any discernible trend line. Apart from our solitary scrooge on zero hits, they all made extra transfers ranging from just 3 to 26 hits (-12 to -104).

12 (23%) took 5 hits or less, and the ranks of these restrained managers ranges from 1,500 to 45,000.

Between 5 an 15 hits was again the most common range with 60% of managers in this zone, and again a wide spread of rank from Number 8 in the world all the way out to 145,000.

26% took more than 16 hits, maxing out at 26. And the ranks in this zone range from 776 to 112,000, with the second best rank of this group (6,238) taking the second highest number of hits (25).

If we look right at the top end of things, the top 10k, where most of us would be more than happy to end our season, the 15 managers in this space took between zero and 25 hits. Our friend who never took a hit ranked around 2,300, but was outplayed by 7 managers who took between 4 and 16 hits (-16 to -64 points).

The highest ranked manager in the analysis was last year’s number 8 in the world who took 12 hits at a cost of 48 points.

So What?

So, I hear you ask, while studying those charts and picking over the numbers was immensely entertaining (wasn’t it??), is there an actual point here? Well, as I alluded to at the start of the analysis, the point is kinda that there is no point. Or certainly no apparent direct relationship between being more liberal towards taking points hits and performing worse at FPL.

So why do people tend to discriminate against points hits so much? Well, while the above analysis was based at least somewhat on some barely credible data, in the words of Baz Lurhmann, “the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience…”

Firstly a general comment, I think its fair to say that the need for taking hits arises when you find yourself in a spot of bother, and that if things are going well (i.e. your combination of good judgement and good luck is clicking), then the chances are you will naturally need to take less hits. So in some ways, I give more credit to guys who have had to use hits and yet managed to come as high as the top 10k, or even 8th overall! After that, of course if comes down to the luck/judgement of taking the right hits.

And this is where I feel the discriminatory attitude to hits is in my opinion a hindrance to an FPL manager. I believe flexibility is king in most aspects of this game, and therefore each situation you find yourself in should be assessed on its own merits, objectively. Every mess you get yourself into is unique! I have seen managers say that they would rather play with 10 starters than take a hit, and I can see little logic in this.

The 2 Point Hit and the Extra Free Transfer

One of the factors which turn people off taking points hits is what I believe is a misconception of what constitutes a successful outcome after taking a points hit. Like sticking a quid into a slot machine, if a shower of points don’t come spitting out it seems to be seen as a failure judging by many of the comments I have seen.

This thinking is probably the logic behind the old chestnut “Never take a hit for a Defender”. Presumably as defenders are less likely to return a double digit score then it’s not worth taking a hit. Buts lets pull at the threads of that logic for a moment.

We get 35 priceless free transfers (excluding GW1 and our 2 wildcards). We value them like gold dust. Spend hours debating what to do with them. So if we take a points hit, where the incoming player outscores the outgoing player by 4 points, what we have my friends is an Extra Free Transfer!

We’ve been able to make a change to our team that we wanted to make at no loss to our points total. In actual fact, if I have a defender I want to move on, I often do it as a hit in a week where there is a high chance of a 4 point gain due to my defensive options having dodgy fixtures.

And as for the 2 point hit, going back to the situation where injury or other unforeseen problems have left you with only 9 players, then taking a hit to get somebody in, who even scores 2, is effectively a 2 point hit. Now some will argue that logic in that it is your bad planning perhaps that has got you to that point, and that as you could have avoided the hit altogether by having a better bench that it’s still 4 points wasted – but I believe that you can only analyse the thing from the place you find yourself in, and refusing on some sort of principle to make an extra transfer that will cost you a max of 2 points, and perhaps less seems a bit daft.

The Bigger Picture – Keeping Your Team Fit

As well as the possible advantages of taking a hit to get yourself out of some immediate problem like an injury or suspension, I would suggest that the value of a hit for keeping your team in shape, and avoiding being late to the party on form players is also underrated.

If you find yourself with 3 or 4 players not cutting the mustard, blanks ahoy and the stats are not giving any reason for optimism, meanwhile you are without some other flavours of the month who are gaining ownership and raking in points. You can be disciplined, make one change a week and three weeks later have cost yourself a lot more than a couple of -4s.

There are times for patience and not panicking, but depending on the specific situation you find yourself in sometimes not taking the hit (or hits) can cost you a lot more than taking them. You won’t always get it right, and will sometimes look back in full “What was I thinking ?!?” mode but if you avoid them on principal them you will definitely cost yourself points at some point or other in my opinion.

Again, my suggestion is keep an open mind and assess each circumstance without any blinkers (either for or against) regarding taking points hits.

The Importance of Assessing the Outcomes

Perhaps another reason people tend to regret taking too many hits, or adopt a policy to avoid them, is the tendency to look at your rank and points total and say “Man, I took 10 hits so far, if I had those 40 points back I’d be ranked in the top 10k!!”. Of course if you consider where you were before and after each hit, and whether they were actually “extra FTs” or “2 point hits”, or whether you gained immediately or over a few weeks by keeping your team in shape with form players, there is a strong possibility that you did not cost yourself 40 points, and may well be better off, assuming your decision making isn’t completely banjaxed.

So its important to make some kind of assessment of how your hits work out to avoid this end of season regret when you’re looking back on -100 points and lost your mini league by 2! This is something that you can only do individually and by knowing your own scenarios before you made your transfers, and don’t panic, I’m not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow analysis of my own 15 hits (-60pts) from last season. The only thing I would add here it to be careful to:

Be realistic in assessing this looking at what the additional transfers were in isolation. Often people say they took a -8 and gained 15pts, when in fact their FT gained 10 and the 2 hits actually cost them a couple of points. Also take into account not the injured guy you transferred out, but the sub you’d have played if you didn’t make the extra transfer.

Take a medium term view, a hit may not pay off the first week (by which I mean break even, rather than gain you a million points), but if for example bringing in a defender with good fixtures and they keep 4 clean sheets out of 5, vs your other options then over the few weeks after the transfer it is likely to at least break even and be an extra FT.

Finally, a more simple way to see how your points hit decision making is serving you is to have a global look at the end of the season as to how your rank trended in the few weeks after carrying out points hit surgery. And here I will bore you with my own example (if only as an excuse to show off my rather good Quarter 4!). The final chart below shows my overall rank in a very mixed season superimposed on the points hits taken.

Without going into the specifics of what the hits were or the scenarios that prompted them you can see that after an inauspicious start a hit in GW5 preceded an improvement, however between GW8 and GW12, a -4, a -12 and a -8 within 4 weeks accompanied a period of floundering around bit, before a plunge to outside 900k (this was accompanied by some awful decisions like benching Mahrez for his hat trick vs Swansea).

However, from there on an 8 point hit in GW18 stopped the rot, and set up an excellent New Year run, which another correction for -4 in GW27 stopped a little slump and set up a storming run in. The later hits were around the DGWs where despite wildcarding I took a hit per week to react to some of the rotation issues and fine tune the Bench Boost plans, which went pretty well. A

And finally, at a time where I think hits can be very effective, the last GW or two where short term thinking is the only thinking, a final day -8 (including bringing in and captaining hat trick Giroud) saw a final surge to around 14k OR.

The only purpose of that exercise (aside from showing off that Q4) is to show that on a number of occasions, biting the bullet and taking some hits to sort the team out appears to have worked, with 4 occasions where hits preceded change in direction of the graph and a sustained increase in rank over the following weeks.

Conclusion (or lack of)…

Being averse to setting down hard and fast rules, I’m not really going to make a conclusion as such. The point of my ramblings an half baked data analysis is more to encourage stepping back from rigid convention, opening the mind somewhat and assessing each situation, each gameweek on its own merits, which will always be personal to you whether you are a consistent top 1k manager, or whether you are delighted with top 100k. I am preaching only flexibility, and challenging only rigidity with a view to making people think and perhaps question.

If I were to offer a general guideline on all of the above, it is that taking a hit with a very short term view, i.e. bringing in a player who you badly want (or fear) for one particular gameweek or plum fixture is a risky strategy, and often just setting you up for a further unnecessary hit the week after. But with that one health warning I say, have at it and trust your instincts. If they are sound more often than unsound you’ll be ok, regardless of how many points hits you took.

Article written by @trevg1977

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