Fantasy Strategy - The Early Season Value Builders

Strategy Discussion:

Early Season Value Building
Initial team being made up mostly of players who you believe are likely to rise in value & those who are 'nailed on scorers'. Making many transfers early in the season, taking points hits, to take advantage of bandwagon price rises. When market/bandwagons begin to slow down, using your wildcard (if necessary {consider that bandwagons usually => players doing well} alongside your new found budget to build a Super-team, aiming for >80% Green Arrows out of final gameweeks.
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I've been monitoring this this season, with an aim to have a go with a secondary team next year. Now, I'm not denying that there are some sampling issues here, players like Ramsey, Yaya, Coleman and Mertesacker were potentially underpriced at the start of the season and we may not see these mistakes made often.

However,

If you believe that there are some underpriced players at the beginning of the game, with the potential to become 'must haves', and are willing to put some work into the transfer market over the course of the first 8-15 weeks, this strategy could give you as much as a 10% budget increase (example below 12% increase in budget by GW9) when it comes to your wildcard. This could mean the difference between a Yaya, Ozil and Hazard type mid 3, or a Hazard, Morrison and Paulinho (:pac:) team for the last 20 weeks of the season.

An example of one of the "Money Players" who appears to have begun in this manner, but has slowed in recent gameweeks to begin to 'play the game' is here
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/77215/history/

For contrast, the current leader
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1340/history/

I believe that at some stage, and in some game-years, that this ought to be a genuinely worthwhile strategy to pursue (Hindsight is wonderful for this year!). The benefit of having a 10.5m striker/mid over a 6.5m, or 4 defenders from the top 4 teams instead of 2 for the final 20 gameweeks should be very pronounced.
--
Has anyone used this strategy before? When did you 'revert' to the points game and stop making the money transfers? Do other people see this as a viable strategy going forward?

KrakityJones

I've kind of been doing this - I haven't totally sacrificed everything to get a higher value team, but I have deliberately taken some point hits some weeks to shift someone out of the team who is on the drop in favor of a player rising in price. Aim was to keep doing this untill Jan wildcard and try buy a better team then.

I think it's a strategy worth considering, but time will tell. I've used the woldcard now and have a team worth just under 110mil with a lot of the top scorers, my closest rival on my league has about 7 million less than me to play around with so I'm hoping that difference will give me an edge.

As I say, time will tell...

PARlance

One thing I've learned is from converting to an active this year is that most actives are doing a pretty good form of this already.
It isn't really rocket science either, it just involves keeping on top of things and putting it down the priority list come Jan.

As a small tactic that I wouldn't have used before:
I've probably increased my bank by 1m over other years by using my bench to make a few 0.1 or 0.2s from bandwagoners that I rarely played.

I'm not 100% sure as I never paid much attention before but I think this year has been a bad year for active players to gain as big an edge this year over others.
Two main reasons for that:
1. "Prolonged" bandwagons on players such as Ramsey and Yaya have seen less active players gain a big bank roll without necessarily having it as a tactic.
2. The lack of expensive "must haves" such as Bale and RVP this year. There are loads of players in the 7-9m bracket that are performing very close to the higher priced players. Bringing an extra 2 or 3m over a less active player into the new year may not be as benifical as previous years

Iused2likebusts

Its an interesting strategy, however, I think a key difference this year is that the bandwagons have worked out massively and kept the initial price rise of a bandwagon rising even further. Going on past performance yaya, ramsey and mertesacker were more or less fairly priced even coleman to a lesser extent. Walcott's and other players injuries allowed ramsey to play in more advanced positions at times and gave him security of starts. Yaya wasnt a set piece specialist until this year and has been fortunate to have pens when aguero was off the pitch a couple of times. Some people bought coleman at 6.0 million ahead of 5 or 6 favourable fixtures with the hope of clean sheets and the chance of a goal. Everton fail to keep a clean sheet but he scores 3 goals in 5 games.

G1032

PARlance wrote: »

One thing I've learned is from converting to an active this year is that most actives are doing a pretty good form of this already.
It isn't really rocket science either, it just involves keeping on top of things and putting it down the priority list come Jan.

As a small tactic that I wouldn't have used before:
I've probably increased my bank by 1m over other years by using my bench to make a few 0.1 or 0.2s from bandwagoners that I rarely played.

I'm not 100% sure as I never paid much attention before but I think this year has been a bad year for active players to gain as big an edge this year over others.
Two main reasons for that:
1. "Prolonged" bandwagons on players such as Ramsey and Yaya have seen less active players gain a big bank roll without necessarily having it as a tactic.
2. The lack of expensive "must haves" such as Bale and RVP this year. There are loads of players in the 7-9m bracket that are performing very close to the higher priced players. Bringing an extra 2 or 3m over a less active player into the new year may not be as benifical as previous years

Bingo. It's been a year so far where the casual player has done relatively OK.
The Ramsey 'issue' has caused a lot of problems then for more active players, me included, who simply refused to believe his good run would continue.

He also did no end of good for those who don't really know how to play the game properly. They got a cheap mid who was the highest scoring player for what seemed like an eternity and they didn't have to worry about how to get in the expensive top scoring midfielder. They were getting all the points they needed for 5.5m

When I think of what Ramsey has done to my season. :mad:

zarquon

G1032 wrote: »

Bingo. It's been a year so far where the casual player has done relatively OK.
The Ramsey 'issue' has caused a lot of problems then for more active players, me included, who simply refused to believe his good run would continue.

Ditto for me with Yaya. There was no way i forsaw his high scoring run and refused to believe it would continue to the point where his price point is now beyond my budget. I went with "smarter" differentials like Hazard and Silva in the early weeks which backfired on me terribly.

It's really frustrating to see the casual players in my private league do so well. The league leader who usually finishes about 500K is at 2K right now and rarely looks at his team! :mad: Yaya keeps rescuing him with luck such as penalties when aguero gets subbed off.

The ramsey injury has hurt a lot of casual players. A long term injury to Yaya would destroy the remaining casual players although they have now made enough profit to move straight to Silva/Oscar and potentially even hazard or Ozil.

Hackers

I could be wrong here but I reckon that "Money player" in the link below has set out form the start of the season solely to have as large as possible a budget in an effort to win the cup competition. His multiple transfer policy has stopped since GW 18 started which coincides with the Cup starting.

Deleted User wrote: »

Strategy Discussion:

Early Season Value Building
Initial team being made up mostly of players who you believe are likely to rise in value & those who are 'nailed on scorers'. Making many transfers early in the season, taking points hits, to take advantage of bandwagon price rises. When market/bandwagons begin to slow down, using your wildcard (if necessary {consider that bandwagons usually => players doing well} alongside your new found budget to build a Super-team, aiming for >80% Green Arrows out of final gameweeks.
---
I've been monitoring this this season, with an aim to have a go with a secondary team next year. Now, I'm not denying that there are some sampling issues here, players like Ramsey, Yaya, Coleman and Mertesacker were potentially underpriced at the start of the season and we may not see these mistakes made often.

However,

If you believe that there are some underpriced players at the beginning of the game, with the potential to become 'must haves', and are willing to put some work into the transfer market over the course of the first 8-15 weeks, this strategy could give you as much as a 10% budget increase (example below 12% increase in budget by GW9) when it comes to your wildcard. This could mean the difference between a Yaya, Ozil and Hazard type mid 3, or a Hazard, Morrison and Paulinho (:pac:) team for the last 20 weeks of the season.

An example of one of the "Money Players" who appears to have begun in this manner, but has slowed in recent gameweeks to begin to 'play the game' is here
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/77215/history/

For contrast, the current leader
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1340/history/

I believe that at some stage, and in some game-years, that this ought to be a genuinely worthwhile strategy to pursue (Hindsight is wonderful for this year!). The benefit of having a 10.5m striker/mid over a 6.5m, or 4 defenders from the top 4 teams instead of 2 for the final 20 gameweeks should be very pronounced.
--
Has anyone used this strategy before? When did you 'revert' to the points game and stop making the money transfers? Do other people see this as a viable strategy going forward?

MR NINE

G1032 wrote: »

Bingo. It's been a year so far where the casual player has done relatively OK.
The Ramsey 'issue' has caused a lot of problems then for more active players, me included, who simply refused to believe his good run would continue.

He also did no end of good for those who don't really know how to play the game properly. They got a cheap mid who was the highest scoring player for what seemed like an eternity and they didn't have to worry about how to get in the expensive top scoring midfielder. They were getting all the points they needed for 5.5m

When I think of what Ramsey has done to my season. :mad:

I'm sorry but this post reeks of arrogance and ignorance. Ramsey was an issue because you refused to bring him in, that's a decision you made that has cost you hugely. He was consistently scoring points for ten gws, it was a no brainer to have him. I don't see how you can claim the people who don't know how to play the game are the ones who bought the highest scoring midfielder at the time for roughly 6m whereas the more "active" players are the ones who watched him clean up and stubbornly refused to do anything about it. Surely it's the other way round, the more active players are the ones who would usually pick up on such value propositions, and the more inexperienced ones are the ones who had the likes of lampard, Gerrard, cazorla and other big name players in their team instead

PARlance

MR NINE wrote: »

I'm sorry but this post reeks of arrogance and ignorance. Ramsey was an issue because you refused to bring him in, that's a decision you made that has cost you hugely. He was consistently scoring points for ten gws, it was a no brainer to have him. I don't see how you can claim the people who don't know how to play the game are the ones who bought the highest scoring midfielder at the time for roughly 6m whereas the more "active" players are the ones who watched him clean up and stubbornly refused to do anything about it. Surely it's the other way round, the more active players are the ones who would usually pick up on such value propositions, and the more inexperienced ones are the ones who had the likes of lampard, Gerrard, cazorla and other big name players in their team instead

I don't think that was the angle of the post.
It's not just casuals that benefitted, any sane active player got on board too.
I think they point was that a 6m midfielder being the run away performer for the first half of the season made it easy to do well for casuals more so than previous years.
For a large chunk of the season, the dream team was well within budget. That takes some of the skill out of it IMO.

I'm certainly not under the impression that it was just casuals that benefitted from him. Must active players were on board too, and rightly so. There was only a select few of us idiots that didn't.

MR NINE

Yeah that is a valid point, it felt like money was no object for the first half of the season, though there were many contributing factors for that. Van persie being over priced and underperforming and Suarez and aguero both starting off at 11(?) made it very easy for people to pick a squad they were happy with. Also the fact that almost all the pricey midfielders were injured or underperforming was a huge factor. It's shaping up a bit better now but still pales in comparison with the days of old. Remember seasons where fabregas, rvp, adebayor, Gerrard, Torres, lampard, Drogba, Ronaldo, Rooney and tevez were all big hitting options and ff players had to make huge decisions and sacrifices. Not to mention the likes of Milner, young, Cahill etc. I'm probably being nostalgic but it seemed a far better game back then.