Fantasy: Thinking About Hits

A framework for thinking about the -4 in FPL.

In the 20/21 COVID-impacted FPL season I played without taking a single hit. This experience got me thinking about hits in a more macro sense and what follows in this post are some notes on the mental frameworks I find helpful when considering taking a hit. This is not a ‘guide’ and any ‘strategic’ suggestions are simply the processes that work for me. I very much hope for this to be a “learning in public” and collaborative endeavour so please do share your thoughts so I can update the post accordingly.

The Decision Journey of a Transfer

It is worth starting with a quick reminder of what the decision journey of a transfer looks like. This will help us have a better foundation for discussing transfers/hits.

Generally speaking, the decision journey of a transfer roughly looks like this:

1. The knowledge we have pre-transfer

   (this is our beliefs prior to the decision and the noisy stuff such as expected points, expected minutes, etc.).

   ⬇️

2. Making the free transfer

   ⬇️

3. Points outcomes

   ⬇️

4. The knowledge we have post-free transfer

   (this is the tangible (but still noisy!) stuff we get in hindsight once the points are clear).

The above decision journey reminds us that fantasy sports are games of prediction. We are making transfers in the face of significant uncertainty and evaluating our transfers is extremely difficult (even in hindsight as the outcomes also contain a significant amount of noise and a particularly distorted feedback loop).

The decision journey for taking a hit (rather than using a free transfer) is essentially the same as the above, the main difference is the stakes of that decision…

The Value of Transfers

A common notion is that free transfers are worth 4 points because a hit costs 4 points.

Thought experiment: let’s take a hypothetical season where you make 35 free transfers and take 5 hits. The total transfers made here is 40 and the total points paid for these transfers is 20 (5 hits at 4 points). It is very hard to reconcile how a transfer can be worth 4 points when you have made 40 transfers at a cost of 20 points.

The value of a free transfer is not equal to 4 points. A hit can ‘buy’ you a transfer but *free transfers* are a currency we get each gameweek. So being able to buy a transfer for -4 puts the ‘ceiling’ of the value of a free transfer at 4 points but the actual value of a free transfer can certainly be less because you would not and do not always buy them.

Therefore, free transfer value can mostly be thought of as the ‘value of the move forgone’. Free transfer value is equal to what it can do for *your* team, which entails that the value will be higher for bad teams and lower for good teams. Free transfer value may also be affected by other situational factors such as being higher in periods of uncertainty (COVID-affected seasons being the best example of this). In most cases, a free transfer will be worth anything between ~1.5 - 2 points.

TL;DR: free transfers are not worth 4 points. 2 points is a good rule of thumb for the value of a free transfer, with that value being adjusted up or down depending on the state of your team.

Frameworks for Evaluating a Hit

Firstly, we need to be clear about what move actually constitutes the hit. As already noted, you get a free transfer every gameweek and it follows from this that the first transfer you make each week will be a free transfer. Additionally, in principle, that first transfer will always be your current highest value move. Therefore, your highest value move each gameweek will be done with a free transfer. Any hit you take will therefore be for the second/third highest value move, not the first.

Example: You have 1 free transfer and your only £13m premium asset is injured. Moving this asset to another premium is your highest value move. You have also been considering swapping out a defender who has a difficult fixture run coming up. If you make both of these moves, you are taking a hit for the second move (defender swap), not the first move (premium swap).

I suspect a lot of people end up taking hits in circumstances where they are not sure what to do and then after the fact conflate the higher value and lower value moves. In most circumstances, the hit you took did not directly get all the points you might want to think it did. The free transfer got you most of the way there and it is the second move that you truly paid -4 for. Moreover, hits are often justified as part of a ‘package’ where the asset they want to get requires two moves (usually for budget reasons). In this kind of situation, you also have to keep in mind that nearly any move you wish to take a hit for can just be done a week later with the next free transfer given.

With this clarified, the practical calculation you would be doing is making sure that the specific hit you want to take adds up to a value of more than 4. This can be very difficult to do in a clear numerical sense and I have found thinking on a more abstract level can be helpful. To an extent, this involves expanding the definition of a successful ‘points-based’ outcome to a more ‘goal-based’ approach and applying a multi-criteria assessment. In real life, this is much easier to do because there are more facets to care about in an outcome (e.g. time, health, wellbeing, social reputation, etc.) and many justifiable reasons why we might want to proceed with an option. However, in FPL this can be difficult due to ‘points’ being the ultimate currency and it is natural to only think about a hit in the context of something like ‘xPoints gained (-4)’. Below I suggest a checklist of some of the additional FPL-related goals which make up this ‘goal-based’ approach and help me decide whether or not a hit is worth it:

• Captaincy: Does the hit allow me to gain the optimum captain for a GW(s)?

• XMins/Injury: Does the hit allow me to remove a player who has poor xMins? (injury, lack of fitness, rotation risk, transfer risk, suspension, manager comments, media stories, etc.).

• Team Value: Does the hit allow me to significantly increase my team value? Your team value can generally be mapped to an increase in points. As a general rule of thumb, this can be anywhere between ~0.3 to 0.5pts per gameweek per £1m.

• Excess of Options: having a significant number more moves of significantly high value than you have free transfers is generally a good indicator you should consider taking a hit.

• Chip Strategy / DGW/Blank: Does the hit allow me to follow an optimal chip strategy or allow me to have better coverage in a DGW/Blank?

• Future/Extra Transfers: Does the hit allow me to bring a transfer forward which I will almost definitely have to make? (If your team is in such a bad way or you are a victim of poor planning then sometimes it might be worth taking a hit to bring a transfer forward that you know you will want to make anyway - this is especially true if doing so allows you to hit a better fixture with that player). Another consideration here is that if you know you will be priced out of a future move that you will likely make then you could be considered to be buying yourself ‘2 free transfers’ with a hit.

In the context of uncertainty as to whether a hit will be ‘mathematically’ worth it, the hope here is that thinking and acting in accordance with the above principles should help produce our best estimate of an optimal hit - or at the very least translate into more worthwhile hits. It is worth noting that, although the above is framed in the context of taking a hit, all can be applied equally to transfers more generally. 

Personal Observations from a Hitless Season

As the reader, you might be feeling slightly confused since I have outlined a framework for considering when a hit is worth it but yet I still did not take a hit in that season. I would suggest there are two reasons for this:

• The first and somewhat straightforward reason is that I was comfortable I could accommodate all of the above considerations with free transfers, mostly through always making transfers with a 5-8 gameweek horizon in mind. I avoid having xMins issues by rarely picking players which have a question mark over their minutes (either through injury or rotation), and it should be noted in my hitless season I got lucky with very few injuries. Even when I got unlucky once or twice with a player I transferred in getting injured that same week, I never got myself in a situation with multiple injuries and could therefore always fix my team with free transfers. 

• The second somewhat more nuanced reason relates to the causality of hits. I have come to the view that in most cases taking fewer hits is a by-product of already having a good season. Generally, a hit is taken to solve a problem. Taking zero hits is not what made me have a good season but rather a natural consequence of me having no problems in the first place. 

Faulty Thinking on the Risk of Hits

There often seems to be a consensus that hits are “inherently risky”. Firstly, let us conceptualise two forms of risk:

1. Absolute Risk (risk in relation to absolute points total); and

2. Relative Risk (risk in relation to your peers/competition).

The idea that taking a hit is inherently risky comes from focusing on the -4 points and viewing the risk through the lens of Absolute Risk. However, in FPL terms, what we actually care about is Relative Risk. The goal of the game is to get as high a rank as possible and the rank you achieve will be dictated by the points you get relative to the rest of the field. You would rather win FPL with 2500 points than get a 50k rank with 2600 points.

The driving force of Relative Risk in FPL is “long-term Effective Ownership” and thinking about the risk associated with hits should be considered in this context. Generally speaking, hits are taken to bring in assets which are considered to be high-value and in most cases high-value assets will accumulate a high Effective Ownership over the long term.

The potential consequence of this is that in most cases hits actually reduce the Relative Risk long term. This isn’t to say that you *should* or *should not* be looking to increase your risk through hits, but rather, if you are looking to alter your risk level through hits then your focus should not be on the -4.

This post was intended to be a ‘download’ of my thoughts/learnings on hits with the hope of providing some insight and helping other people. I would very much like for this post to grow and develop as a resource for people to refer back to so please do contribute your thoughts and ideas¹ and I will update the post accordingly so we have a great one-stop resource for thinking about hits.

Best wishes

elevenify

If you have any questions about this article then please do comment below. I will do my best to respond to all comments.

1. Many thanks to the following lovely people for their input and comments: @fplreview, @FF_Trout, @FplStatsdan, and Mark Mansfield.