Every season an 8 digit number of FPL teams are entered with one goal - to win Fantasy Premier League 🏆.
It is the most exclusive club and so difficult, so few have ever done it.
So what's the secret?
I spoke to the greatest FPL managers that have ever played the game, and a number of FPL World Champions to bring you the best advice you'll ever get in one article, guaranteed. Make sure you lock in for this one 🔒.
There are some elite managers that have consistently gotten somewhat close, so what can we learn from those that repeatedly come close, and combine that with advice from the Champions for that extra 10% we're missing. So each of these guys are going to take 2 minutes of your time to lay it all out.
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Let's begin 🚀.
Elevenify
Elevenify is the number 1 manager in the world over the last 4 years. His average finish over that time is 1K. You know how on your FPL profile it says your % finish, this guy is sitting on straight 0.0%'s. They need another decimal place for his ranks to make sense.
Here's what he had to say to you.
Thinking in Probabilities 🎲
Fantasy sports force you to make decisions under uncertainty. You can't find certainty by delaying, procrastinating, or hedging. Every week you have to commit to a choice before the deadline.
This trains a particular kind of thinking that is enormously helpful in life: thinking probabilistically. You have to get comfortable assigning rough probabilities to uncertain outcomes. This forces you to be explicit about what you actually believe and how confident you are. What is the likelihood something will happen and how big will that impact be?
Fantasy punishes thinking in binary terms. The best decision-makers are those who learn to deal with uncertainty properly. To think in distributions rather than outcomes. To make decisions that are right in expectation even when they won’t always pay off individually.
Having good predictive data sets can sometimes give us a false sense of certainty. You still have to think about your decision. Learning to think probabilistically about your decisions is an entirely separate skill from having good data models.
This isn't only about player/team forecasts, but also your general strategy when playing FPL. Think about what you want to achieve and analyse whether the likelihood of your actions are actually moving you closer to that. You are trying to make a forecast of all the relevant things that might happen. You want this picture of the world to be as accurate as possible and update this as new information comes in.
He has his own website with free data for FPL purposes.
Joshua Bull
Joshua Bull is an FPL World Champion and mathematician 🧮.
The Power of Stats 📊
Some general tips:
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Have fun - take risks, Captain that Brighton defender, bring in that crazy differential! You are meant to enjoy playing. At the end of the day it's just a game, if you feel like FPL is affecting your mental health then first of all take some time away.
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You always need luck to win; the skill is in putting yourself in the best position to be lucky.
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The best tool we have to do this is stats, they're the least biased way of comparing players and making decisions. That doesn't make them perfect, and people can always cherry pick stats to support a pre-existing narrative, so be careful!
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That includes fooling ourselves into pretending our decisions are based on evidence and not the other way round - don't be afraid to recognise that your own picks are biased/not working out, and change them. Recognising that you've made a mistake backing your favourite player/ignoring a popular choice and correcting it is better than doubling down!
I'd be lying if I said you don't need to get very lucky, but obviously if you don't play well luck is only going to take you so far. I think most people who take FPL seriously are spending a fair chunk of time thinking about it, but I've found that the more time I spend weighing up all the possible options the better I do. A lot of that time is collecting every tidbit of information I can get my hands on, in the hopes that it makes it clearer what the best long term option is. (Disclaimer: please don't spend literally all your time thinking about FPL in the hopes of winning a stress ball, at the end of the day it's only a game!)
Tarek Balbaa
You can quite literally count on one hand the managers who have 10 Top 10K's, Tarek Balbaa or FPL Egypt is one of them. It's difficult to articulate just how insane finishing in the Top 10,000 out of millions of managers 10 times is 🤯.
