How I turned £2 into £2000 playing Fantasy Football

Jonny Chapman is GambleGeek’s fantasy football expert. Visit GambleGeek.com to read more from him.

In our last article we discussed different strategies that could be used for the first major fantasy football tournament of the season, MondoGoal’s £10,000 Guarantee tournament. At the end of the article, we said we would review the tournament to see which strategies struck gold.

The winner of this week’s Fantasy Major is a prodigious talent, likened to “a young Brian Clough”; I (GoldenDonkey) was the lucky punter who took gold and the £2,000 first prize.

Tense finish

Jokes aside, the sweat was really, really intense. I only had one player left on Monday, Yaya Toure, and I was miles behind the lead. I knew I had a small chance, but it was not going to be easy.

City were cruising in the first half when Yaya scored a contentious goal. With murmurs of the goal being attributed to Silva, my F5 key took such abuse that it needs replacing.

All the sites attributed the goal to Yaya, but it is not clear. In the haze of trying to work out if my only remaining hope in the contest is live, Yaya scores a second (legitimate) goal.

Things are looking great and, suddenly I sit atop the leaderboard. I frantically check the other teams, a lot of people in a similar position at the start of the day had Sterling as their sole City player and he has fallen by the wayside.

I feel I am a huge favourite. As the 60 minute mark approaches, a whole new batch of teams are surging up the leaderboard, they have up to four City players, the race is not won.

City make a late substitution, I think to myself, “Silva has to come off here, they always wrap him in cotton wool when crushing…..WHAT THE ACTUAL $%@&, WHY TAKE OFF YAYA!?”.

OK, the last bit in capitals was screamed rather loud, next to an open window. Now I had to sit there and watch the teams with four live City players for around fifteen minutes. Every pass forward was agonising, I was ahead, but not by much.

People had Yaya and Silva, another real threat was a friend of mine and former colleague at a gaming giant, ‘thesilkworm’. He had selected the entire City defence, and already had a good score as a base.

I went from cheering City, to booing them. Willing Anichebe to score, or at least not give the ball away. My emotions went from joy to pure panic, I was all-in and had no control, I had no live players left.

In poker, it is quite smart to estimate your equity against your opponents range, here it is (currently) almost impossible to quantify your equity with so many variables changing so fast.

12 minutes becomes, 11 minutes 30 seconds. The time just will not pass, like all time restrained activities clock watching just won’t help. I try to count the passes, anything to take my focus on how long is left.

If any City player scores, I am doomed, all my hopes burned. I concentrate on the upside, keep your eye on the prize, but I am helpless, I can not do a thing.

Final Whistle

After what seems like an eternity, the final whistle blows, it’s going to be so tight, City just passed it around the back at the end of the game, gaining my opponents further points. ‘thesilkworm’ and I are chatting on social media and the results come in.

City’s clean sheet netted my opponent 18 points, (or the equivalent of two goals on Mondogoal). Which is a massive amount, it theoretically counters Yaya’s two goals. When the dust settled, the difference between 1st and 2nd was 0.85 points. The finest of margins. What a rush!

‘GoldenDonkey’ created a risky team that paid off. Six players scored at least once, yet had two terrible scores in Leighton Baines (who didn’t feature) and Stekelenberg.

As a side note, from the Sunday games onwards, I had a cheeky bet on each of my players being the first goalscorer on Betfair. They *all* came in, I guess that is what you call running golden!

‘thesilkworm’ fought a valiant battle all the way to the final whistle, due in part to the resilience of the city defence. Mahrez and Pelle provided the next highest scores. A tight defence can go a long way.

‘FightingLikeBeavers’ went with a Palace defence, but was hamstrung by the benching of Hennessey. Despite the setback, an assist and goal from the Palace defence, coupled with the outstanding individual displays of Yaya and Mahrez earned enough points to capture an effective 3rd place.

Lessons Learned

If I could go back in time and make the same decisions on team building, would I do the same? The answer is a resounding “NO!”.

I made a total of 10 teams, which simply had far too many common players in them. Both Mings and Baines did not play, both of whom were in a lot of my teams.

I needed to have more unique players, to minimise the impact of a missing player, or one who is injured or sent off very early. The only team that did well for me, was my uniques team, the highest variance team I had.

Also notice, one player did not play, and one player scored negative points. Despite these detriments, it shows that it is possible to win a Major when carrying dead weight.

I also didn’t have a team with the West Ham defence, that team would have done very well, and been much cheaper than the entire City defence.

I think that in these Fantasy Majors, with large fields, that a strategy of picking a lot of uncommon players that you think will do well is a very strong one. The more uncommon and risky things you can do, the more payoff you have.

Optimal Strategy

People tend to enter minimal teams and hedge on the favourites, which is a great strategy when entering one team in a 10 player contest (as you want to minimize variance) but won’t work very often in a large field tournament, where a lot of people will have very common (and usually expensive) picks.

In summary; in small field events, pick a safe team (with maybe one flair choice), in large field events, try to increase your variance as much as possible, this means, pick the risky ones who could do well in addition to a few safer teams.

Entering more unique teams does give you a greater chance to win the overall event, or cash in the higher positions.

Let us know in the comments how you fared, or what you thought of the winning teams. Be sure to get involved this week as Mondogoal is having another £10,000 contest for gameweek 2, enter now and see if you can keep me from repeating as champion!