FanPost

Buy-and-hold, chasing points and other International Break ravings

Hi Y'all.

With all my whining about the YFF game this season I'm off to my best start ever: 3rd place in Beat the Bloggers 1 (I'm playing as Q*s Old Farts this year, amazed that the name got by the censors). My better half, the General Manager (Joan FC) is also doing very well, 9th place in BtB-1.

We did a lot of research before the season, which helped. But I also think the new, tighter budgets have forced us into some good team management habits: picking the best "known quantity" players possible from the start, staying with them unless they're injured, and being cautious with new imports who might not adapt well to the EPL game in the early stages.

I started with the following lineup:

Foster, Caulker, Bertrand, Debuchy, Lamela, Sterling, Fabregas, Sigurdsson, Rooney, Sturridge, Jovetic

and I've made just two changes through Week 3: Foster to Forster (hardly a change at all, wordwise) and Jovetic to Diego Costa.

The Costa injury scare before the Everton match threw us into a panic but we stuck with him and it paid off big-time. We knew Fabregas from his previous time at Arsenal would be good for a consistent 12-15 points a game. Debuchy has been OK but we're hoping he'll eventually spring for 10-20 like he did at Newcastle last year. Not ready to dump him yet and we're looking at the heat maps and position charts for warning signs that his role has become more defensive (tactics are not our strong suit). Bertrand is a reliable defender who's capable of scoring a goal, and Lamela looks like a breakout player if he doesn't wilt under the physical strain.

Chasing points was never a good strategy, but now with 100 points spread among 15 players it's deadly, especially as the season progresses and the players you want get more and more expensive. If you've looked at my spreadsheet you may have noticed what I call the "checkerboard effect," where players who score high one week tend to do poorly the next and vice versa. That's less true with elite players who can go on amazing scoring runs, but generally it seems like a good argument against chasing points. Keeping the same players is good for the head, too; a lot less buyer's remorse.

Going into this weekend Sturridge's injury (and the arrival of Balotelli) is the only worry. I'd like to get Welbeck in there somehow, but the price difference in that swap means more money in the bank and the temptation to mess with other players on the team, which I don't want to do. Fortunately my bench is fairly solid (Cresswell, Rodwell, L. Moore) so I may wait a week and see how things play out.

My league research over the last few years has shown the importance of getting off to a good start. By Week 10 or so the best YFF gamers are at or near the top, while the merely lucky ones fall back. It's very hard to move up significantly once you've fallen behind. I'm usually around mid-table in my NMA league when the season ends (not too shabby considering the level of the competition) but I'm hoping this new hands-off approach will put us near the top.

Finally, a note about YFF. It looks like changes are being made to the mobile site (where you can now see other teams) but not the desktop site (where nothing much has changed). I think there are business reasons for doing this (no easily visible source code on the mobile site for nosy people like me to pry into), so if the YFF improvements are over it looks like last year's weekly Top 50 player count after the deadline is a thing of the past. Maybe now I can sleep a little later on Saturdays if the early match looks like a dud.

I had an idea last season that if enough NMA readers were willing to let me see their squads we could collect their URLs and do a weekly count from that list. But now I'm not sure if that's doable even if there was enough interest.

And let's not forget the fact that we still can't see how we're doing in the YFF Universe (can we?), so there's no Global Top 50 to look at anyway. But the spreadsheet still looks updatable (I refuse to do data entry by hand) so I'll do my best to keep that current.

Best of luck to all this weekend, and this season!
BtG

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