NRL Fantasy 2020 Part 87 - Kotoni Staggs is now a half so he'll move a few feet in.

So the guy in 1st averaged over 1000 points a week, faaaaark off

mrbrownstone wrote:
5) Points over money. Too often I left cash in the bank for planned upgrades that never eventuated. Trading Leilua to Young the most egregious example.

You had a great list but this one I found really hard this season. I actually had "points over cash" written down at the start of the year, but somewhere in the middle panic set in about cash gen, and so to make upgrades I did sideways shit like Leilua to Young. Even ignoring the banner, even if Leilua just stays steady a high 40s average, it's just the wrong move

multiple.scoregasms wrote:

I've played the game long enough to have tried 10 different ways to bye plan

For me, it seems to work best when I completely ignore bye planning in your initial squad. That leads to thinking where you want to keep someone priced at 30 that is averaging 32 because you will need them in round 12, rather than grabbing a solid cow.

After the dust starts to settle in round 4-5 I start to figure out the byes. For this to work you need to be able to estimate who will be in and around origin contention and who is no chance. Players with NZ and England eligible are great here because you can count on them being available, although they still have to be good fantasy options like Surgess and James Graham were in the past.

From there I make a list of the teams playing and the must have players from those teams. Normally ends up being around 8-9 players that you absolutely want scoring for your team as top shelf guns.

Next step I plan how to attack it. There will always be a bye that seems "harder" because less fantasy relevant teams are playing, it's normally the last big bye. This is the one that I attack the hardest to try and make sure I have 17 players on the field including all of the must have guns.

So plan normally looks like this

Get your starting squad of the best available players>Trade hard in the first 2-3 weeks to get the best available cows you have missed, while not sacrificing guys you believe in>Make your first upgrade targets the guns that are playing the first big bye>1-2 weeks before first big bye start to fill out your squad with some cash outs that play the bye>Blow through trades very quickly between bye 1 and bye 2, I would normally max trade in this period>Come out of bye 2 needing only 1-2 guys to round out your 17, with a plan to grab them the week after the 2nd bye>Hold on for dear life on the ride home, with 1-2 trades for injuries

Didn’t they introduce tests last year between Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, PNG, Lebanon, NZ, England around the Origin dates as well now? So moving forward there could be a plethora of players absent from their NRL teams.

B/L wrote:

I just cant see it happening.

All the players are busted, will shorten the pre season.

Mass exodus of players will pull out to have off season surgery.

I think it just weakens the product although I do enjoy it not interrupting the nrl season.

but if it makes more money in the short term that's all the NRL seem to care about at the moment.

StormTrooper96 wrote:

Didn’t they introduce tests last year between Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, PNG, Lebanon, NZ, England around the Origin dates as well now? So moving forward there could be a plethora of players absent from their NRL teams.

Last year the internationals coincided with standalone Origin in rep round with no NRL games.

StormTrooper96 wrote:

Didn’t they introduce tests last year between Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, PNG, Lebanon, NZ, England around the Origin dates as well now? So moving forward there could be a plethora of players absent from their NRL teams.

This is normally done in the separate rep round where all teams have a week off. Origin players don't miss games this week

Panthers vs Roosters
Raiders vs Sharks
Rabbitohs vs Knights
Storm vs Eels

Roosters vs Raiders
Eels vs Rabbitohs

Panthers vs Rabbitohs
Storm vs Roosters

Storm 20 vs Panthers 8

With fantasy finishing, looks like I'm going to have to deposit some money into my sportsbet account and start betting for the next month.

StormTrooper96 wrote:Panthers vs Roosters
Raiders vs Sharks
Rabbitohs vs Knights
Storm vs Eels

Roosters vs Raiders
Eels vs Rabbitohs

Panthers vs Rabbitohs
Storm vs Roosters

Storm 20 vs Panthers 8

These predictions aren't biased at all.

When will my missus understand that fantasy is not silly and that it requires quite a bit of knowledge, study, planning, math and luck and to be within the top 50, 100, 1000 in the world is quite a massive accomplishment. Hopefully next year she understands why I spend 40+hours a week on this thing. Just need to win some choccy's!

Aardvark wrote:Tried a different approach this year (rather than usual 'conservative trading and make up ground during the byes' tactic) and did the following.

- Traded hard early to get rid of dud initial picks (worked)
- Tried to jump on cows early (meh...wasted a few trades on shit house picks when waiting a week or two would have been better)
- Tried to jump on a few guys with lower ownership who had price dips or were coming back after injury (this worked to some extent but bit me on the arse this week when guys like Jazz, Bateman, Pearce, JFH etc all flopped at the same time)
- Didn't pull my team apart to get in a gun (waited on Ted until his price dropped a bit and was rewarded)

Had the usual 50/50 decisions which went the wrong way - Randall, Clarke over Fog etc but would probably make the same choices again.

Lessons learned were
- don't waste trades on mid season 'cows' thinking that they might be the last. A new one always comes along.
- it's fine having a boom/bust guy or two but don't load your team with them.
- save some trades for the 'resting' (if HN gives you trades put them in your pocket!!!)

Pretty sure I have learned all of these things before but managed to forget them.

Has been a fun year and a welcome distraction from all the uncertainty surrounding pretty much everything else.

Thanks to all the regular posters for the tips, discussion and especially the laughs.

I did this with Magoulias thinking he might be the last chance at decent cash generation for a while

StormTrooper96 wrote:When will my missus understand that fantasy is not silly and that it requires quite a bit of knowledge, study, planning, math and luck and to be within the top 50, 100, 1000 in the world is quite a massive accomplishment. Hopefully next year she understands why I spend 40+hours a week on this thing. Just need to win some choccy's!

40 hours!?  I hope watching the games is included in this. I guess if you count chatter on here, I'm more than guilty too!

This is also one thing I did less of, looking at my team.  It might not seem like it, but early on I did my best not to let doubt creep in and go with the gut and not entertain other ideas.  Again late season was harder but spending less time and going more with initial thoughts seemed to work out better this year.

multiple.scoregasms wrote:

I did this with Magoulias thinking he might be the last chance at decent cash generation for a while

MAGOULIAS 2021!

Final rank for me is 3593, so pretty bad compared to my last couple years (~1400s in 2018, 147 in 2019), but not as bad as it could have been considering how bad my team actually was at the end.

Things I did well this year:

- Didn't really break my team to get a gun in, the only times I bought guns I was either upgrading two middies to a gun and cow, or trading an injured gun to another gun.

- Had my CTRs sorted by round 4 when I bought in Stephen Crichton at 313k, and had Lomax in the other spot all year.

- Didn't sell my guns too early (I held Papy and Mann all year when a lot of people sold them), with the one main exception of Lucy Leilua.

- Got Teddy in before his 111, meaning I got him for ~100k less than most people did.

- Got on some great PODs at the right time (Fotuaika, Wighton, NBrown)

-------------------------------------------------------

Things I did badly this year:

- Chased my pods a bit too hard (e.g. selling Friend for Hughes after round 1, selling Walters to Magoulias after round 2 when Magoulias got named late). That Hughes one in particular really stings as my logic behind it turned out to be correct (I correctly guessed that Hughes would be the main man in the attack with Munster doing less), but the timing was wrong.

- My captain picks were all shit barring a couple (Haas in rounds 4 and 5, Cleary in round 16), though I will forgive myself for the last two weeks where I captained Wighton and Papy for a 39 and a 41. With those two, I made the call that my team was heavily outgunned and short of a 17 so I had to take a risk with the captains, especially since I had sold Haas. What I'm really annoyed at myself with is how I captained Teddy for 4 weeks straight from rounds 9-12, while I still had Haas

- Got absolutely destroyed by bad 50/50s. Some examples might include:
        - Starting with Arrow instead of Cleary when Cleary was 10k less, I was and still am a dirty pod chaser.
        - Starting with Croft instead of Flanagan when they were priced the same at the start.
        - Selling Jamil Hopoate to Paix instead of Fogarty the week they were about the same price
        - Buying Averillo instead of Talau the week that Avo had a head knock and missed 3 weeks, then I bought Talau the week after
        - Buying Angus Crichton instead of Tohu Harris, the week that Angus got injured.
        - Buying Randall instead of Starling in round 12, and I could have just held Field and taken Luai's score that week but nope, I chased the points and got burned when Randall failed his HIA.
        - Buying Munster instead of Moses back in round 13 when I was selling Luai. I had freed up some spare cash from selling Grant down to David Fifita and decided to upgrade Luai to Munster, since I thought my initial prediction regarding Hughes was wrong, so I bought Munster. That one trade was the one that killed my season the most, as from that point on, I was forced to use all my remaining trades on having 17 players each week.

In short, I suck at fantasy but in all seriousness, I think my main problem is that I always feel like my team is way worse than everyone else's, and then I go chasing pods to try to compensate for that.

multiple.scoregasms wrote:

I've played the game long enough to have tried 10 different ways to bye plan

For me, it seems to work best when I completely ignore bye planning in your initial squad. That leads to thinking where you want to keep someone priced at 30 that is averaging 32 because you will need them in round 12, rather than grabbing a solid cow.

After the dust starts to settle in round 4-5 I start to figure out the byes. For this to work you need to be able to estimate who will be in and around origin contention and who is no chance. Players with NZ and England eligible are great here because you can count on them being available, although they still have to be good fantasy options like Surgess and James Graham were in the past.

From there I make a list of the teams playing and the must have players from those teams. Normally ends up being around 8-9 players that you absolutely want scoring for your team as top shelf guns.

Next step I plan how to attack it. There will always be a bye that seems "harder" because less fantasy relevant teams are playing, it's normally the last big bye. This is the one that I attack the hardest to try and make sure I have 17 players on the field including all of the must have guns.

So plan normally looks like this

Get your starting squad of the best available players>Trade hard in the first 2-3 weeks to get the best available cows you have missed, while not sacrificing guys you believe in>Make your first upgrade targets the guns that are playing the first big bye>1-2 weeks before first big bye start to fill out your squad with some cash outs that play the bye>Blow through trades very quickly between bye 1 and bye 2, I would normally max trade in this period>Come out of bye 2 needing only 1-2 guys to round out your 17, with a plan to grab them the week after the 2nd bye>Hold on for dear life on the ride home, with 1-2 trades for injuries

This is fantastic, thanks mate! Have added it to my black book of screenshots.

Fantasy really need to add a preious year history record. There's a few years in there where I just was worried about beating work mates that I couldn't even recall my ranking. Foolishly I never took note. A history in the site/app would be benficial.

wolfking wrote:Fantasy really need to add a preious year history record.  There's a few years in there where I just was worried about beating work mates that I couldn't even recall my ranking.  Foolishly I never took note.  A history in the site/app would be benficial.

Yeah, this is why I have a spreadsheet for that.