Some really good points raised recently, and worth continuing. I've seen a lot of straw man arguments in this thread, some people seem to think that those saying that a mixture of skill and luck are needed to succeed in FPL, are really saying skill is not involved or that all managers near the top are of exactly the same ability. That is not what is being said, well certainly not by me.
The Dazzler wrote:Valeron wrote:I'm saying the following.
Ville is a skilled player
Ville has got way more than his share of the breaks over a number of seasons.
No. Prove it.
The most likely thing is he is doing as well as he should be.
Actually Dazzler, your logic comes unstuck here, that is not the most likely thing and you are failing to interpret the evidence properly.
I think we all agree that both skill and luck play a part in FPL performance, and the debate centres around how much it plays a part. If you accept that both skill and luck can influence performance, then by picking the highest performers, you not only get the some of the most skilful, but also the some of the most lucky. Incidentally you could also fail to find either the most lucky, because as you pointed out the most lucky manager could be a poor one, and you could fail to find the most skilful, as the most skilful manager may not have been particularly lucky and have a good rather than outstanding record.
This has been explained previously in the thread, as have a lot of other things:
Carlos Kickaball wrote:We've originally cherrypicked these very good managers, to not only find managers who are skilled, but managers who are skilled and have also had luck on their side.
Stemania wrote:Quick question. How do we know the managers highlighted in this thread have had luck on their side in the past?
Carlos Kickaball wrote:Because they are the statistically best performing managers, picked from a very large group. If you think that both luck and skill are involved in doing well in FPL, then it follows that based on their performance you think they have been both skilful and lucky, and also that it's likely that there are plenty of similarly skilled managers with less impressive records.
Maddocio introduced an interesting ideas about comparing ranks.
maddocio wrote:How do you compare ranks across seasons is it better to use absolute numbers or logarithms (probably the later but in any case there is surely some subjectivity in how you derive the formula). There will be some difficulty in comparing over different seasons because of different scoring systems etc, however it must be possible to normalise each season.
I think a log scale would actually really help, as one thing I've noticed is that the distribution of players really thins out at the top. A consequence of this is that if you would have finished around 5k with average luck, a chunk of extra points could take you up to 1k, but losing the same amount of points would take you down the rankings much further, as a result an unfortunate season is often very harshly punished in terms of rank record. You can see that in Hancock's record, whereby he has scored more points in previous seasons, but seemingly has a worse set of ranks mostly due to one year. I think that a top manager could have an excellent and consistent looking record just by avoiding any particularly unlucky seasons because they are the ones that damage the rank.
maddocio wrote:Let's consider some judgement related fields where absolute performance is clearly measured
Academic performance - clearly there's a range judged by exams and other matters. Not everyone can be Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
Professions - some people unfortunately don't have the aptitude for certain professions and even within those professions they'll be a range. Not everyone can be Lord Chief Justice.
Chess - A game of skill (and a little bit of luck). Not everyone can be Magnus Carlsen
Poker - A game of skill (and a lot more luck). Not everyone can consistently perform at the high level but a significant number do over and over again.
Gambling - A hobby/profession with a combination of skill and luck. No one could argue that there's a range of performance here but there are clearly some outstanding performers.
In each of this fields I've made been extensively involved with varying degrees of success but it's absolutely clear that there's a range of ability in all of them.
One thing I would say is I think that FPL in terms of luck and skill, generally has a higher component of luck (or less time to even it out), than some of the other examples given. Most of these examples contain a high amount of skill and are much harder to master than a game like FPL. Gambling is an interesting example though, because it would appear to be very comparable with FPL, the big difference that gamblers have is that they can concentrate on only betting on specific things and choose how big they want the stakes to be in, whereas FPL usually forces you to make a lot of closer calls without being able to choose the stakes.