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ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

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CBN
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ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by CBN »

The weekly one-off Sun Dream Team Weekender had long been derided as a lottery in the days when you had to pick eleven players. The change a couple of years ago to a team of seven saw many write it off completely. But two weeks ago I won my third Weekender in the last few years, beating a field of 162,573 entrants.

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It left me reflecting on whether it's luck or skill? I think the answer lies somewhere in between: with such a large field and such little variation in the players being picked, a good amount of luck is needed - something I'll show as I work through my team and those of my closest challengers - but skill, or 'strategy', does play a significant role.

So how did I go about picking my team? I should stress at this point that I spend no more than about five minutes on it but there are a few things I work through. The first is the fixtures:

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First things first, you need to form a view on which teams you expect to perform that weekend - attacking and defensive wise. For the defence I adopt one of two approaches. The first needs no introduction - the 'block defence' is a staple of the Sun game. This is typically my approach and the one I employed this time. It's an all or nothing approach requiring you to hit a clean sheet. However, often a clean sheet on its own won't be enough - you'll need to find a defender who scores a goal and/or gets star man. This means I tend towards teams with a goalscoring defender or star man magnet. I also tend to avoid defenders from the big teams and the teams playing in the 12:30 Saturday kick-off. My logic here is that these players will be popular and if they do prove to be the right choice that weekend then I'll be competing against a lot of other people. I'm prepared to write these weeks off. So my choice was Burnley - unfashionable, solid at the back and with players capable of a goal from a set-piece.

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The second of the two approaches I mentioned is a split defence where you take a goalkeeper and defender from one team and a defender from another team. The idea is to hit a goal with both of your defenders. Incredibly tough to pull off but if you manage it then you have a serious shout! A completely mixed defence is an approach to avoid.

So then it comes down to the front four. There is much less strategy here - you need to hit goalscorers! As you'll see, I picked popular players but I took three from a single team, Man City. This is quite unusual for me as by picking players from the same team you are limiting the number of star men you can pick up. The perfect strategy would be to pick players from four different clubs in order to maximise star man potential but it's not as straight forward as that given you won't have four clubs with great fixtures. If you pick a team that runs in a few goals then you can benefit from assist points. I really fancied City to run goals in so went with them, and Mo Salah. As it transpired, City 'only' scored three but all my players were amongst the points.

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Looking back on my team it was well structured and had a solid thought process behind it. But I was still lucky! I hit the Tarkowski star man but neither Pope or Mee got rating points. That meant my defence only picked up 23 points and there were other defences out there to pick up 24 points simply from clean sheet and rating points. I also had Jesus who picked up five points while many other strikers picked up eight points. This completely disproves the theory that you need the ''perfect' side to win - far from it is the reality.

I hope you found this article useful. I might write more on the seasonal game.

CBN.

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by lfc71 »

At first glance i thought heres a guy blowing his own trumpet.

Not the case (& apologies for thinking that :oops: )
A great & informative write up there CBN & one i'm sure will help many folk(including myself) on the pursuit of winning this comp.

Great stuff & congrats on your (3rd :shock: ) win at this๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿ’ช.

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by Ex-Pro-Gaffer »

At first glance I also thought heโ€™s blowing his own trumpet

At second glance I also thought heโ€™s blowing his own trumpet

At third glance I still thought heโ€™s blowing that trumpet

At fourth glance I grabbed the saxophone and joined in this musical extravaganza !!...absolutely brilliant to have won this 3 times ๐Ÿ’ช ( p.s - just a reminder you are not allowed to say anything within the realms of personal praise on this platform btw ๐Ÿ™„ )

As king of the weekender ๐Ÿ˜€๐Ÿ˜€๐Ÿ˜€๐Ÿ˜€ ( see what I did there ๐Ÿ˜‰ ) my approach is totally different to yours, I play the league tbh, Iโ€™ll basically pick a safe team 38 weeks of the season based on my football knowledge, some weeks itโ€™s up to 6/7 players from the same team, it may be an early Fa cup game and City have a minnow for example, 50-60pts would tick me over, making sure you always enter a team is important, miss 1 or 2 weeks and you can forget it !!

Now back to you CBN ๐Ÿ˜‰, I cant actually believe that this team won tbh, such an obvious low scoring defence team, thereโ€™s normally a little gem in there e.g Traore,Pulisic,Siggy,Grealish on a weekend where theyโ€™ve smashed it.

Well done and Congrats again Simon ๐Ÿ’ช๐ŸŽ‰ - looking forward to the seasonal thoughts...๐Ÿ‘Š

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by ronny10 »

I look forward too Simon's reasoning behind leaving out sterling and picking drossard :D

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by Ex-Pro-Gaffer »

ronny10 wrote: โ†‘28 Dec 2019, 11:10 I look forward too Simon's reasoning behind leaving out sterling and picking drossard :D
Ronny !!๐Ÿคญ - on a serious note will be interesting to know

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by cclem345 »

Great write up Simon. Mine for this week is much simpler.

Theory behind it. Palace dont often score that many and Soton not renowned for their defensive stability.

Bedereck or whatever hes called wins aerials- rating for sure maybe if its 0 0 starman.

Aubameyang against Chelsea may not be a popular pick but takes pens and I do believe Arsenal are due a win.

Aguero should be starting after getting hooked last night. Due a few goals to show Pep hes still the man and is fresh.

Probably end up with about 4 points. Let's see.
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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by admin »

Thanks for doing that write up. Much appreciated.

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RickyRosa
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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by RickyRosa »

Great write up from a great manager.

Just goes to show that you should enter every week, I often forget as I feel it is a lottery.

Not any more though.

WP.

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Re: ARTICLE: Winning the Dream Team Weekender - luck or skill?

Post by jpk »

pedantic parade pissing but it looks to me like the number of entrants that scored points is about 28,000 as you get a place on the leaderboard under your account whether you actually enter for that week or not. in other words around 167,000 people have entered the weekly at some point in the last 18 weeks but only 28,000 actively put a team together for week 16. there's around 140k teams on zero points, i guess they could just be really crap at picking teams but more likely not picking at all

it drops off over the season, i think last year actual weekly entrants fell to around 12k by the end


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