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Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

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The Dazzler
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by The Dazzler »

Valeron wrote:What exactly do you mean by 'over achieve'?
By 'over achieve', I mean getting better results than they should, due to luck.
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.
Valeron wrote:If there are several thousand skilled players (which I believe there are) it's completely normal if you root around such a a sample size to find an anomaly or 2.If you really want to find it. Nothing against Ville, good luck to him, but that's just the reality of numbers. Looking at his strategy backs up my belief that he's no more skilled than several posters on here.
Where has this idea come from? There is not several thousand skilled players and then a cliff where there is a couple of million unskilled players.
There are 3 million players with 3 million differing levels of skill (and those levels are constantly fluctuating as players improve/disimprove due to numerous factors but that's a separate point).
Possibly the best way to understand it is that each player is worth a certain amount of points per week.
Ville is possibly 65 points per week, someone else might be 60 points per week, a poor player might be 50 points per week.
And of course, Ville isn't head and shoulders clear of others. There are players who are worth 64.95 points per week, others 64.90 points per week, etc, etc.

Who are these 'several posters' on here that are as good as Ville?
You thinking that his strategy is not impressive backs up my belief that most players underestimate the complexity of what they consider simple things. His strategy consistently gets elite results. You just don't understand it (nor do I for that matter, or at least I can't replicate it).
You might look at Ronnie O'Sullivan scoring a 147 and say after each individual shot, 'I could have played that shot.' Perhaps you could but you can't play all of them. You're looking at Villes individual moves and saying, 'I could have done that.' But you can't achieve what he does over the course of a season, let alone over 7 seasons.
And because you can't replicate or understand what it is he does, you can't just say, 'well, he's lucky'.

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thekrumcake
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Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by thekrumcake »

Sutter Kane wrote:...in fact he may have had dreadful luck and is actually much better than we think!! (bad luck that stops him winning every year :lol: )
While I realise your comment is tounge in cheek, I think it is worthwile to point out that this is extremely unlikely. I think you can assert that Ville probably has avoided longer spells of bad luck so far.

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Sutter Kane
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Sutter Kane »

thekrumcake wrote:
Sutter Kane wrote:...in fact he may have had dreadful luck and is actually much better than we think!! (bad luck that stops him winning every year :lol: )
While I realise your comment is tounge in cheek, I think it is worthwile to point out that this is extremely unlikely. I think you can assert that Ville probably has avoided longer spells of bad luck so far.
Well yes part of it was tongue in cheek. However the point remains that you can't determine it's probable he's avoided most of the pitfalls solely by looking at his points and ignorantly deciding "no-one can be that good without some good fortune". The only way it can be partially proved it by looking at every gameweek of every season and analysing where he's had breaks and the opposite. It's no more likely he's had good luck as anyone else in the whole game and that 'analysis' fall down further with each brilliant season he produces. We just don't know based on points totals alone.

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eastcentral1
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by eastcentral1 »

hancockjr wrote:
eastcentral1 wrote:No, the laws of probability would state that luck tends to even out over the course of several seasons. And that someone who ranks higher than someone else over the course of several seasons is a better player.
Which law of probability is that?
The law of large numbers. Whilst the numbers here may or may not be significantly large, it is a reasonable assumption that the more seasons one takes a high ranking into account, then the less likely it is that luck has played a role. Or, to put it another way, a player that finishes in the top 1k 5 seasons in a row is more likely to have a positive skill/luck ratio than a player who finishes in the top 1k in their only season played.
hancockjr wrote: It's actually quite the opposite, you will get plenty of freak "luck" among participants.
??? You think that as the number of seasons increases in the analysis, so does the element of luck??

Obviously, amongst millions of players there are some who will be more lucky over the course of a number of seasons than others. But this "lucky" number should diminish over seasons, not increase.

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Carlos Kickaball
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

You have to be careful with the law of large numbers. What it does not say, is that if you have thousands of medium sized samples, they'll all be representative and therefor you can deliberately pick out one of the most striking and unusual ones and then make strong claims about why it's different, especially when there will a couple of outliers by chance. At some point I will come back to this, as there have been some decent points raised again, but it has been pretty well covered and explained already.

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MoSe
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by MoSe »

forgive me if I interlope.....

I saw El Tel of Ealing online few moments ago
  • I only know him from the Hall of Fame of the FISO Divisional Championships sidegame
    where he'd been the 1st to earn 4 Titles, at the beginning of 2012/13 season, only equalled then by atx1303 and this season by Brightwater
judging from his profile/posts, these days he's mostly interested in Fantasy Golf, Cricket, Cycling and TFF
but he still has a FPL team, and I had indeed figured the "Sexual Ealing" one I've spotted since January in the first page of the FISO forum League might have been his one

in 2015 he's bobbing between 1k/3k overall ranking, which is remarkable although alone it might not put him in the loupe for your genius search :wink:
Last two season were not at the same level (albeit still much better than I've achieved so far myself, for instance)

But his run in the previous 6 (2006 - 12) struck my eye
OK, none inside the Top 100, but I find his consistency in the Top 1.5k over so many consecutive seasons outstanding

Code: Select all

Season	Points	Rank
2006/07	2061	  1281
2007/08	2268	  1469
2008/09	2141	   715
2009/10	2436	  1235
2010/11	2247	   143
2011/12	2255	  1095
2012/13	2131	 41433
2013/14	2254	157179
[/size]

So I'm just curious:
how would you rate his 6 best seasons run?
and how'd you compare it to the other "genius" players you're debating about in this topic


thanks :D

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MoSe
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by MoSe »

reading back in the OP...
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=113861

summarised:
eastcentral1 wrote:
Carlos Kickaball wrote:
liquidfootball2 wrote:
Blaze wrote:
baganboy wrote:Nobody over here is an FPL genius. Good players, yes. Very good players, yes. FPL genius, no.
I beg to differ.
Sure, there may not be any on FISO, but Ville is 100% certainly considered an FPL genius.
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/366766/history/
What an outstanding record, never seen one that good
It's a good record, but if you look at enough player's records, you'll eventually find one that good.
It's an outstanding record. (Not sure why it's relevant that if you trawled through enough players you could find a better one... I certainly wouldn't want to take on the task of looking).
From4corners wrote:I just wanted to say the same thing, that is so damn impressive :shock:
  • Stemania wrote:There's a decent enough list on FFS' Hall of Fame of which Ville is top. I guess where Blaze found him in the first place.
    I presonally prefer the record of Ulrik Nylund and Kenneth Tang to that of Ville Ronka, but there you go. On fiso, I rekon handcockjr (Julian Hancock) has just about the best record - I'm sure he'd be first to admit he's had a couple of 'dodgy' years recently, especially one - still 14th in the FFS list though.
    Carlos Kickaball wrote:Yep, that's what I expected, it's a selection of the best result from a large community.
    Blaze wrote:Ulrik, Kenneth and hancockjr would only come under baganboy's 'very good' category. Ville is a genius, plain a simple.

Code: Select all

       - EL TEL -    - VILLE -    - HANCOCK -
Season Pts    Rank   Pts   Rank   Pts    Rank
06/07  2061   1281
07/08  2268   1469
08/09  2141    715   2078  4266   2201     96
09/10  2436   1235   2466   569   2567     19
10/11  2247    143   2225   362   2199    852
11/12  2255   1095   2243  1631   2209   4219
12/13  2131  41433   2248  4668   2180  18446
13/14  2254 157179   2534    90   2444   2730
[/size]

I'd say, taking out last season Ville's 90th place, El Tel's records was even better.
For sure it was when you could have a direct conparison in the four 2008-12 seasons

currently, 47p separate them, and less than 2k places

OF COURSE that's JUST SCORES & RANKINGS
much more interesting would be to compare the players strategies, as I gather you've been doing in this topic (when not going astray on sidepaths :wink: )
Last edited by MoSe on 14 Apr 2015, 12:09, edited 2 times in total.

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Carlos Kickaball
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

You should add Hancock Jr into that table MoSe (Because I'm too lazy to do it ;) ), but also because in completed seasons he has more points than Ville.

Obviously we won't get a definitive answer, but I'd be interested to know how much easier it was to get a good rank back in the earlier days, much fewer players, and also now we have a lot of information available on sites like FFS, meaning that almost anyone can cobble together a templatish team of reasonable picks and stand a good chance of raiding the top of the rankings.

Does anyone know how many entrants there were in the earlier years?

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by MoSe »

Carlos Kickaball wrote:You should add Hancock Jr into that table MoSe
added

big mon
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by big mon »

Why is big mon not being talked about in these parts, fantasy record is second to almost none. :?

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

big mon wrote:Why is big mon not being talked about in these parts, fantasy record is second to almost none. :?
Because only big mon can talk about big mon, big mon. :P

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by hancockjr »

big mon wrote:Why is big mon not being talked about in these parts, fantasy record is second to almost none. :?
Your FPL link must be broken - it links to some guy who's never finished above 743...

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by maddocio »

There some really interesting points on this page of this thread that have got me thinking

In particular

i) Carlos's observation that Hancock Jr should be included because he had a higher total score. Never thought of this before but surely if you're going to do a thorough analysis it would be easier to use score (an absolute measure) rather than rank (a relative measure). 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.

ii) This whole it's not only about the raw scores but we need to analyse and look at how they got the scores stuff really got me thinking, then i had a moment of clarity.

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.

Check out my FPL link, if you ignore the season where I spent more time in Azeroth than the real world then you'll see that I do ok - never outside the top 50k but never close to the top 1k. After 8 3/4 seasons of FPL I'm happy to accept there are people (as with all of these other fields) that simply have more ability than me - they see things that I don't see and use there knowledge and ability to better act upon what I do see.

Yes hardwork, effort and even contacts (esp with gambling!) can help in all of these but the bottom line is that there is a clearly fundamental level of innate ability in all of this fields - why is fantasy football any different.

Surely like any other judgement related field there will poor, average, good, very good or genius level performers and the concept that Ville (and some others) aint one of the latter after 100s of gameweeks (with multiple decisions in each of those gameweeks) is simply incredible.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by The Dazzler »

Nice work Maddocio. Fwiw, I think there is nothing between Ville and Hancock apart from 1 'average' season from Hancock. That certainly doesn't mean Hancock is a lesser thinker on the game.

Let's catch up with Ville.
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/ ... istory/32/
This week was an interesting one for Ville.
He had 2 FTs so he had to use 1 and he decided to drop Austin and get in Remy.
Well that backfired a little as Remy didn't play. Clyne was also unexpectedly absent. Ameobi didn't play and neither did Baird so Ville played with only 10 players and scored 52 points, dropping 1 place from 446th to 447th.
So was this an error? I believe it was.
A lot of players remove their 'weakest link' every week. It's a policy I adhere to myself. It's not one Ville uses.
Ville has had Baird for a number of weeks now and he hasn't replaced him (he's even dropped in value by £0.1m for him). He bought a risky (minutes wise) Ameobi in GW27, rather than the more nailed on Cork (at the same price £4.3m), which we highlighted at the time as being an error.
This week, it has only cost him 2 points (Austin scored 2 points) but the structural problems could creep into GW33 as well.
He has 2 free transfers but he has 3 players who certainly aren't going to play, (PVA, Koscielny, Sterling). And now he has 4 players with some doubt over their playing time, (Clyne, Ameobi, Baird, Remy). So it's a tricky week for him.
I guess Clyne + Remy would be most likely to play so I think Ville may have to replace Ameobi + Baird?

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Bergkamp_22 »

I keep up with Ville's progress in my own time a little, and although i haven't watched him like a hawk such as here (impressive!) i think i've picked up what he looks for.

If i had to choose out of your choices i'd say he'd get rid of Baird, as you say Clyne + Remy should play this GW. He was unlucky they both didn't same time last weekend to say the least.
Ameobi had featured in the previous 5 (although one under 60min), i don't believe he'd prioritise to get rid of him also. He likes the strongest first 11, and doesn't prioritise depth as much until he has to (again, maybe i could be proven wrong here but i remember this being mentioned here also earlier in the season).

Since he WC'd GW23, most have been big player/first 11 changes where he just skips around. Bar Ameobi because Marney was injured. Kasper another, admittingly gets depth at GK :)

TL:DR - Could be totally wrong but predict Baird will go. The other is debatable but i'd doubt Ameobi/Clyne/Remy. I'll guess he gets rid of Eriksen if he does two.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by The Dazzler »

Bergkamp_22 wrote:I keep up with Ville's progress in my own time a little, and although i haven't watched him like a hawk such as here (impressive!) i think i've picked up what he looks for.

If i had to choose out of your choices i'd say he'd get rid of Baird, as you say Clyne + Remy should play this GW. He was unlucky they both didn't same time last weekend to say the least.
Ameobi had featured in the previous 5 (although one under 60min), i don't believe he'd prioritise to get rid of him also. He likes the strongest first 11, and doesn't prioritise depth as much until he has to (again, maybe i could be proven wrong here but i remember this being mentioned here also earlier in the season).

Since he WC'd GW23, most have been big player/first 11 changes where he just skips around. Bar Ameobi because Marney was injured. Kasper another, admittingly gets depth at GK :)

TL:DR - Could be totally wrong but predict Baird will go. The other is debatable but i'd doubt Ameobi/Clyne/Remy. I'll guess he gets rid of Eriksen if he does two.
I'd agree with your analysis that he concentrates on his first XI but this week is a little tricky.
Anytime I've tried to guess what he'll do, he's done something else, so I'm not confident myself.
Baird however is very likely. He has PVA + Koscielny so unless he sells 1 of those, he has to sell Baird to get the minimum 3 defenders playing. Duff is the cheapest popular current choice and seems likliest.
He might leave it at just the 1 transfer, if he wants to use his 2 free next week to fill up on Pool players. The more I think about it, the more I think he will leave it at 1 and gamble that everyone plays.
If he does decide to use both transfers this week, whilst Eriksen might be on his list to go, he does have a decent game this week so I'd be slightly surprised if it's him. I would certainly expect to see him go next week though if Ville holds.
If he decides to replace Ameobi, Cambiasso might be a decent shout. It would cost him £0.4m though and would be want to play him for his double next week in any case? He could just swap to Cork at the same price but if I had to guess, I'd imagine he'll leave Ameobi.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by liquidfootball2 »

Update on Ville's moves

2 transfers Baird -> Schlupp
and Remy -> Ayoze

As predicted by previous posts Baird was a prime candidate to go, although he brought in Schlupp for his good fixture this week and double next. He decided to lose Remy and bring in Newcastle's Ayoze, a very cheap 4.3 Newcastle forward and play Ameobi, also 4.3, in midfield. He now has options next week, perhaps to play 5 in midfield and bench Ayoze. Eriksen with his good fixture this week retains his place.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by gallus »

liquidfootball2 wrote:Update on Ville's moves

2 transfers Baird -> Schlupp
and Remy -> Ayoze

As predicted by previous posts Baird was a prime candidate to go, although he brought in Schlupp for his good fixture this week and double next. He decided to lose Remy and bring in Newcastle's Ayoze, a very cheap 4.3 Newcastle forward and play Ameobi, also 4.3, in midfield. He now has options next week, perhaps to play 5 in midfield and bench Ayoze. Eriksen with his good fixture this week retains his place.
Ayoze instead of Murray is strange, but as a proud Ayoze owner I'm not allowed to disagree. :D

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

I find that second transfer absolutely baffling.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by gallus »

Stemania wrote:I find that second transfer absolutely baffling.
he'll probably switch to 352 and sell Ameobi for Hendo.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Bergkamp_22 »

Me too, literally in my head "he will go down as a genius if.."

Clearly didn't want to risk Remy for perhaps combined reason of possible non-starter and Costa perhaps coming back for the second DGW game. Playing it safe.

But Perez? I'm curious. :lol:

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

Pérez is at least a starter until Cissé is back from his ban, and they have Spurs, Swansea and Leicester, three pretty poor defences to play. I think Ville is likely to be freeing up money for the DGW, and he may take a hit next week in splashing the cash.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

But if you're going down to an essentially base price striker surely Vardy was the only reasonable move to make. Are funds really that tight for him that he couldn't have afforded the extra 0.2m for Vardy and Morgan instead?

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

Yeah with the DGW you'd have thought Vardy was the sensible choice, but you never know what he's planning... if he spends all his budget next week we'll know why.

Without the help of the DGW Pérez is better than Vardy though, Vardy has only scored 3 goals in the Premier League and often ends up playing on the wing as Leicester have lots of forwards.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

Carlos Kickaball wrote: Without the help of the DGW Pérez is better than Vardy though, Vardy has only scored 3 goals in the Premier League and often ends up playing on the wing as Leicester have lots of forwards.
That may very well be the case but the fact is we do have the help of the DGW.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

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.

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Stemania
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

The player with the best record is the player most likely to be the most skilled.

This is not necessarily true of the luckiest player. All the skilled players tend to pick from a relatively small pool of players, and certainly usually widely own all the players who can rack up big scores over a consistent period and are captain candidates. If the player at the top has been very lucky then it's pretty likely a large number of other skilled players will have profited from the luck as well due to the small pool of players involved. The players picked by 'unskilled' managers will come from a much larger pool and so relative swings of luck will be much more prevalent. Moreover, bigger extremes of luck will be possible the bigger the size of the pool of players from which we are picking, so the largest extremes (and so the luckiest player) is more likely to appear among the 'unskilled' player with a poor record rather than among the highly skilled players.

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Sutter Kane
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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Sutter Kane »

On top of that I would add, how many seasons/time does it take for someone to not be judged on their luck and be considered actually brilliant at FPL? In every field, there is/are a few that excel. There isn't always 1000 people who are the same level of skill, where luck decides...Schumacher, O'Sullivan, etc, etc.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Carlos Kickaball »

Sutter Kane wrote:On top of that I would add, how many seasons/time does it take for someone to not be judged on their luck and be considered actually brilliant at FPL? In every field, there is/are a few that excel. There isn't always 1000 people who are the same level of skill, where luck decides...Schumacher, O'Sullivan, etc, etc.
Carlos Kickaball wrote: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.
Well you've hit the jackpot there by seemingly dismissing 2 straw men at once, no one is denying Ville is an excellent manager or saying that all managers at the top are of identical ability. :lol:

The comparisons to snooker and F1 racing are bogus, it should be clear that these are much more skilled events that take years to master. Consider which you would be more surprised by, someone rocking up to a snooker club who's never picked up a cue before, but watched snooker on the tele and has been given a couple of tips, putting in century breaks, or someone taking up FPL for their first season reading the forums and looking trough the rules and finishing in the top 5k.
Stemania wrote:The player with the best record is the player most likely to be the most skilled.
Completely agree.

But if you are looking at the records, who is the most likely to be the most lucky? The same player.

The reality is because of the interaction between the two, and the volume of players, the best and most lucky player are likely to not be the top performer, even though he would be the best guess. An example would be looking at peoples heights, if you had a list of men of different heights, and someone asked you to guess which one was the heaviest with no other information, the sensible guess would be the tallest one, but that does not make it always correct.

I would actually be interested in the answer to some of these related questions.

What is the range of outcomes that people think a skilled elite player should expect, and how likely do people think they are to finish in different positions?

For example to people think Ville is certain to finish in the top 5k every year so long as he tries?

Where do posters here think they are likely to finish, and with what probabilities? For example what is the chance you will finish top 1k, top 5k, top 10k, top 50k, top 100k... etc.

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Re: Discussion around good; very good or genius FPL players

Post by Stemania »

Carlos Kickaball wrote:An example would be looking at peoples heights, if you had a list of men of different heights, and someone asked you to guess which one was the heaviest with no other information, the sensible guess would be the tallest one, but that does not make it always correct.
So you agree that it's sensible to guess that Ville is the most skilled player (among the players we know of) even if it might not be correct?

Wasn't that the whole point of the thread?

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