FPLBeno

I am Free Hitting this week and decided to write a long piece on increasing your exposure to luck in FPL. This is especially important on a Free Hit week. Insightful read if your attention span is not cooked. Topics covered: • Risk in FPL • Risk on a Free Hit • Correlated Variance (CoVar) Why incorporate more risk on a Free Hit than in your normal team? A Free Hit is a great opportunity to add risk because the decisions do not roll over for multiple gameweeks. Everything is contained to a single week, and a single gameweek naturally carries far more variance than a longer stretch of matches. In probability, risk has equal upside and downside, but not equal strategic value. A Free Hit lets you target an extreme outcome in a week of your choosing, often when low-owned picks have higher expected value. Get it right and you can separate from the crowd in one gameweek, get it wrong and the loss is contained to that week. That is why a Free Hit is the perfect moment to embrace volatility and chase upside. How to expose yourself to risk on a Free Hit The most common approach is to go for low-owned punts. This works, but you will naturally end up with some low-owned players anyway because you are taking one week punts. A less common but extremely powerful method is to embrace defensive and offensive stacking of players with correlated outcomes, which I refer to as Correlated Variance, or CoVar. Defensive CoVar is generally stronger than offensive CoVar because defenders from the same team are heavily correlated through clean sheets. They usually either all get the clean sheet or none do. Stacking two or three defenders from the same team increases the chance of an extreme outcome, both good and bad. This gives you the best odds of a huge return, and the strategy is so strong that many fantasy formats add stacking penalties to limit it. In the table, you can see the clean sheet outcome probabilities for Free Hit 13. It is boom or bust, but the odds of hitting a haul favour stacking. Offensive CoVar means stacking two or three attackers from the same team. A single goal can generate returns for both the scorer and the assister within your team. Midfielders also correlate through a clean sheet point, although bonus points are shared. You are essentially betting on one team performing well and needing fewer goals for a big overall return. With two attackers, there are two ways to get correlated returns from a single goal. Add a third attacker and this increases to six possible scoring-assist combinations. That is why triple attacking stacks massively increase the chance that at least two players profit from every goal. The same logic applies if defenders chip in with attacking returns. It is important to highlight that while stacking is powerful, you should still aim to maximise expected points and avoid sacrificing too much just to force stacks. For example, City have the best clean sheet odds, but a defensive triple-up without Haaland gives up too many expected points. I hope you found this piece insightful.

Brighton opponents: [Spurs + Chelsea] • Huge striker numbers in both games (Welbeck) • Consistently decent CB numbers (Van Hecke) • A large peak for Spurs at Right Back (Wieffer)