5 Killer Tips for Big Fantasy Football Tournaments

Big fantasy football tournaments are the dream of every ambitious fantasy manager. The high number of participants means that prize pools grow large and there are significant prizes on offer for the best teams. If you want to send successful teams onto the pitch, you’ll need to understand the game strategies which increase your chances of winning, so read this article on 5 killer tips for big fantasy football tournaments.

What is a big fantasy football tournament?

A big fantasy football tournament is one which usually attracts over 1000 participants, often even 2000 or more. The large number of participants means that there are countless fantasy teams with all sorts of line ups. This requires a different strategic approach to setting up your team. Should you just go with the flow?

The following 5 killer tips for big fantasy football tournaments will help you to apply the right strategies and to set up successful teams. go ahead

5 Killer Tips for Big Fantasy Football Tournaments

In the 5 killer tips for big fantasy football tournaments, you will learn the basics of the game theory you need to be successful in big fantasy tournaments.

Tipp 1: Make a difference –> Ownership in Fantasy Football

In fantasy football, the term “ownership” indicates how often a particular player is used by the field of participants. In big fantasy tournaments it is particularly important to be prepared to place your trust in players who are ignored by most other fantasy managers.

This may seem counterintuitive, because the most-nominated player is usually the player with the highest expected value, but there is a good reason why it may be better to choose a player with a lower expected value.

Let’s take Kane as an example, on this day we expect about 75% of the teams to include Kane. Therefore, you can beat  75% of the field by not having Kane in your line ups. In addition, due to his high price, you are still not dead in the water even if Kane scores once, because you will have been able to deploy your budget elsewhere. If Kane scores twice, however, it will be tight.

Lower ownership levels, by definition, mean that those who do own an overlooked player automatically have an advantage over the rest of the field if the player earns a lot of points. It’s not just about finding a player with low ownership, but finding one who has the potential to score one or more times. This match day, for example, Perez of Newcastle or Wood /Barnes of Burnley would be the type of players you’d be looking for.

Tip 2: Performance variations in players

Every football supporter knows his team’s “Mr All-or-Nothing”. From coming on as a substitute and scoring 4 goals by half time, to barely covering 3 meters in the whole game and still managing to see yellow /red, with him anything is possible. These performance variations, also known as player volatility can make fantasy football very interesting, especially in big tournaments.

An example

• Player A is Mr Consistency and always earns 8 or 12 points. His assumed expected value is 10 points.
• Player B is our Mr All-or-Nothing, who will either earn 1 point or 15 points. His assumed expected value is 8.

Mathematically, you want to have Player A in your team because you get more points. In large tournament fields, however, the most interesting players are the ones who can really make a difference and “totally run all over the game.”

As a rule of thumb, the bigger the number of participants in a tournament, the more you need these volatile players. The smaller the number of participants, the more you want to rely on players with the maximum EV. This tip goes at least double for DON or heads up where you only want the players with the maximum expected value.

Therefore, it may also make sense to set up a player with a lower EV, even though you still have budget left, we’ll explain why in the next tip.

Tip 3: Use the budget, but remember it’s a limit not a target

The budget you save using tip 1 will give you a wider range of investment opportunities and allow you to use players other fantasy managers have to pass over in order to stay within their budget. This in turn allows you to choose players with lower ownership, as it means that you can choose players few other managers can afford.

A mistake some managers make, however, is to think that they always have to use every last penny of the budget. From a purely logical point of view, this only makes limited sense. It is correct that the more expensive players generally have a higher expected value.

However, one must differentiate between absolute expected value and expected value per spent million. Assuming that you always have to spend your entire budget, means that you voluntarily place a limit on yourself without any good reason. It can sometimes make sense to save some capital.

In addition, some vendors have a “tiebreaker” scheme which means that when two teams score the same amount of points, the team which uses the least amount of budget is given preference and thus by using less budget you give yourself an advantage in this situation.

Tip 4: Cracking combos

Create mini teams within your team. If a player scores three goals, he has to be the beneficiary of 3 assists. These little “internal teams” are often the key to reducing the number of assumptions you have to make.

This will increase your chance of a successful tournament. If you use 11 entirely independent players, you make 11 individual assumptions that each of them will score so that you can win the tournament. Even if each of your 11 players has a 50% chance of scoring, the likelihood that all 11 players will actually score is 1 in 2048. But, in this same example, if you reduce your assumptions to 5 by creating mini-teams, the probability would be 1 to 32.

Sometimes the chemistry between players is just right and they like to work together to score. For example, the partnership between Salah and Firmino is well known in the Premier League. Sometimes the relationship is a little more one-sided like in Azpilicueta and Morata, where Azpilicueta was able to prepare 7 times for Morata.

Tip 5: Hunger Games!

Motivation is also one of the most important factors in professional football. Many players are especially motivated when it comes to matches against their former club or trainer. These players can be particularly hot and can put in an even better performance due to this extra motivation. The Champions League semifinals had a couple of good examples of this, namely when Mo Salah and and James Rodriguez played against their former clubs (with Liverpool against AS Roma and with Bayern Munich against Real Madrid respectively).

Example:

On this match day, a player who exemplifies all our tips (with the exception of tip 4) would be Alexis Sanchez. Sanchez is often very expensive and on paper, his game against Arsenal looks to be very tough. An expensive player in a tough game will probably be chosen by very few daily fantasy football managers, hence low ownership. Sanchez is also a player with extremely high volatility, one day he can score 3 goals and the next he can pick up a yellow for dissent which sees him substituted in the 70 minute, with him it’s all possible.

In addition, Sanchez is playing against his former club and trainer, but the game against Arsenal is not as tough as the opponent’s name suggests. Arsenal are playing in the semi-finals of the Euro League on Thursday and coach Arsene Wenger has been rotating like a windmill to give his team the best chance of participating in the Champions League next season. In addition, Wenger has not been able to win an international title yet and is in his last season at Arsenal. Therefore, he will put the focus very heavily on the Euro League semi-finals and not worry too much about the game against ManU, which should go a long way to helping Sanchez bag some decent points.

Conclusion

In the 5 killer tips for big fantasy football tournaments, you learned the basics of the game theory you need to be successful in big fantasy tournaments. Do you have a tip for the big tournaments? Post your killer tip in the comments.

We wish you every success in daily fantasy football!

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