Yes.. i believe the use of the knowledge... is how you determine the skill level..
to a certain extend i do not intend to plan weeks ahead for fantasy.. just taking part.. so making 50k in FPL would be a miracle...and luck on my part.. but equally like a lot of casual players.. i don't have sufficient knowledge about OPTA stats and read the rules of every fantasy football game i enter and try to work out the best possible team

Best topic on the forum. Great discussion from some of the top guys in the game.

As a pretty avid poker player I have a decent understanding of the the terms, variance and sample size. Put it this way, 38 game weeks tells jack sh1t about the true ability of ones fantasy skillz. I have no idea what the number is, maybe combine your season ranking after 50 years and get the average, that might, just might give you a fair reflection

Play 38 games of Poker vs any of the top guys in the game and they'll come out on top every time.

You have lucky GWs, you don't have lucky seasons.

This is a great thread, have just been catching up on it. I liked best a couple of the posts comparing this to other forms of gambling.

The way I see it is this:

At the start everyone has a 50% chance of doing better than average.

A strong team selection may give you say a 60% chance of doing better than average in any given GW.

A skilled player will keep this edge throughout the season by making good transfers, team choices and captaincy selections. Maybe building up the 60% edge to 61% or 62% as they make strong decisions throughout the season, play the transfer markets well etc.

How far this edge will take you is down to luck and how the FF dice actually land each week. The more skilled the manager, the more the odds are in his favour but really the degree of skill is in just how far you can weight the dice in your favour. Maybe a good manager can keep it at 60% for the season while the best can stretch it up to say 65%.

Over a course of a season the talented manager can expect their edge to tell, but how much it will tell is down to just how favourable the weekly dice rolls turn out to be.

So you think someone who consistently finishes inside the top 10,000 has just had his 65% chance of luck fall every season over say 6-7 seasons?

I guess it's all down to opinions but I'd say it's another one of those 20-80 rules.

At the start of the season on a single GW, it's nearer 80% luck and 20% selection, skill etc.

As the season moves on through the GWs, there's more stats to take into account, more football has been watched, more transfers have been made by people planning ahead and thinking wisely, and profit has been gained.

By the end of the season, this 80-20 has changed, to 20% luck.

If this wasn't the case, then you'd hardly ever see consistent good FPL managers, and their rankings would range from 1.5 million to the top 100, which I don't think I've ever seen.

The cream always rises to the top. You'll often see managers with a great history, currently be ranked for example in the 200,000s but come the end of the season they're once again around or inside the top 10k.

Of course, it's understandable and partly human nature that people who don't do well on the game, will say it's mainly luck, whilst the better players will say it's less luck, but the above is an attempt at looking at it from a neutral POV.

I'm a firm believer that skill is important in maintaining consistently high finishes. I should hope so given the time and effort I put in to it myself.

Having a 65% edge on the weekly throwing of a dice is a huge advantage over 38 weeks, so someone who has the skill to maintain this will naturally always do well. am in agreement that a talented manager will build upon this advantage as the season progresses.

One shouldn't get too bogged down in the actual percentage figures I've used, it's really just to try and illustrate the point that it's about trying to weight the probabilities in ones favour.

Once near the top, other teams (whether by luck or judgement) are going to be at say 65% too. A weaker 'lucky' manager will see this percentage drop as they make sub-optional decisions as the season progresses, but they might easily still be over 60% for a long time. A strong manager will maintain their 65% edge but this still leaves them up against thousands of 'lucky' managers who are only slightly disadvantaged.

This is simply not true. Although it depends somewhat on how you define a "game of poker", you would need thousands of tournaments or hundreds of thousands of cash game hands for short term luck to even out.

So you think if you played against some of the top Pros, over 38 games, you'd win overall? I'd place a heavy bet that you'd never come out with more chips because the skill would beat the short term luck.

Like I say, those who don't score very well will put it down to luck, so it's a non debate really anyway.

As I said, you'd need to explain what you mean by a game of poker. I'm not saying that I'd expect to win - the pro would obviously be favourite - but the chances of winning over that small of a sample are bigger than you think.

If you entered 38 single table tournaments with a pro, paying top 3, with decent other players, there's only a tiny chance you'd do better than the pro, in my view.

But does the luck in 38 GWs reflect the luck in 38 tournaments or 38 hands or somewhere inbetween? Impossible to make this comparison, just that somehow poker is similar in the 'long run' aspect. This exhausted debate was fun, in a masochistic kind of way.

This is my main competitor's history:
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/746273/history/

This is mine:
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/5965/history/

Could he have been lucky for 5 straight seasons? I very much doubt so. But I do agree that a large slice of luck is required to finish in the top 3,000 consistently.

Would like to see stats without Captain bonus points. Just actual first 11 points as Captain is the big luck thing for me that can sway so many points.

Getting the right Captain in your team is anything but luck (as ever, in the long run...). Take a double gameweek - anyone who doesn't get the person they really want as captain is almost certainly making a mistake.

luck might get you to a top 3000 finish (the 50 or so points that would get you a top 5000), but skill/knowledge/dedication will mean you have a chance of getting there. if a player consistently finishes in the top 3000 they are a very good/skilful player.

Cognitive dissonance

Any updated views on this?

I got lucky. Again.

Well done another fine season fella

I've just been reading some of the earlier posts and would go along with the view that skill gets you in to a certain bracket (say top 10,000 for a skilled player) and luck determines where you finish within that bracket.

Eg - Hancock it is probably fair to say you are one of the most skilled players and that is good enough to get you into the top 5,000 each year. How do you feel each season went - did this one feel any less 'lucky' than the others?

There is enough luck floating around though that an average player can easily have one outstanding season. This is purely down to the huge numbers of people playing. Take this year's winner, who's positions have been:

68905
116580
116549
84193
228195
1

This is a player I would rank as no better than competent, with limited skill. They've just had one amazingly jammy year. Seems to be a common theme with managers at the very top of the leaderboard.

Also the same when you go on a GW by GW basis.

A hell of a lot of the highest scorers in a given GW are overall not very good, with ranks often even outside the top 100k.

You'll get good GWs and bad GWs but I've found it's the consistent scorers that fair better at the end of the season.

Agree that if you know what you're doing, you'll be inside the top 5k, with luck deciding where you finish between 5,000th and 1st.