math

Hindsight Optimization for FPL

This season certainly proved how random FPL could get, full of difficult decisions and regret. Every GW, we’d look at our team and wish that we’d that shiny player everyone else had. Sometimes Bruno, sometimes Gundogan, and sometimes Martinez. Week after week we were filled with regret after not buying (or worse: benching) that player. Of course with hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to see what you missed. But what if you could get the ‘Almanac’ just like in Back to the Future 2 and know how every week would play out?

Continue reading

O-Ring Optimization for FPL

“The Numbers Game”1 is a great read for anyone interested in football (soccer) analytics. The book covers a wide range of events where numbers give insights to football professionals on topics like possession, short/long passes, and team evaluation. I have recently read the section about the “O-Ring theory”, which brought a couple of new ideas regarding FPL. O-Ring theory says that a team (or a system) is as strong as its weakest link.

Continue reading

On the meaning of optimal in FPL

The amount of available content for Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is unbelivable and hard to follow. Among all, one of my favorite resources is the “Corridor of Uncertainty” podcast as they focus on modeling and analytics part of FPL. Their guest in the latest episode was Abdul Rehman (FPL Salah), who is a well-known manager in the FPL community. I truly enjoyed their discussion and noticed that the word “optimal” is thrown around quite a bit.

Continue reading

On FPL, Optimization, and Ownership Weights

Robert Cialdini mentions scarcity as one of the 6 principles of persuasion. The nature of seeking something of great interest is embedded inside all of us. Our first reaction when we see other people do something is to follow them. Even though it does not make too much sense, we follow the herd even in a competitive game, like Fantasy Premier League. Last week’s (GW11) unfortunate gold rush to Jota proved that we fear being left out.

Continue reading

Plotting a piecewise function graph in LaTeX

I absolutely adore LaTeX generated documents and personally use it pretty much for anything I can. Plotting graphs is one of my favorite thing to do. TikZ library makes it quite easy. To plot a piecewise function, I happened to learn about \tikzmath which I have never used before. Using it, you can define values and also perform math operations. I used this approach to set values and plot the graph dynamically.

Continue reading