Welcome to another edition of the Best Buys

ADVICE FOR THE WEEK
Some timely advice to consider if you want to win overall, or your league. Consider your trades precious, and look to buy low and sell high. This means that it is often more important to time your downgrades right more than upgrades. Downgrades allow you to realise value and net a bargain. Upgrades need to be thought through similarly. I will make it clear, if you want to win, you need to make best use of every dollar, and as such you should avoid paying full price for a premium…or for any player. Due to the cyclical nature of the game, and the 3300 rule, there will almost always be a player who represents value or a bargain. Therefore, bring in bargains for upgrades, not necessarily best player available. If the best player is a bargain too, that’s good and well. An example of this is Brendon Goddard at the moment. The best defender, but is about 50k away from his peak.

On to the rest of the show: (more…)

Not to be confused with Owl City, US synthpop group.

So, there was 600 comments in the last post, and about 500 of them are about the forward rookies. I think it’s time to put my own thoughts down on the subject.

Before looking at the trade, what I want you want to do, is go back to your original plan. Most people right now, would have spent 2 trades on re-jigging and 1 trade on an LTI.

How many trades do you need to upgrade your team?
How many trades do you need for LTI?

Look at that original plan, and think – do you have enough cash cows to go through with it? Or are you going to struggle to free up enough cash.

Remember what we said in an earlier post, a good trade should score you 300 points over the season and net you $100k

So, taking all that in mind, should you be looking to pick up Pods/Rockliff? Well, let’s examine the three main options.
(For the purpose of this analysis, I’ll be taking Pods, with an average of 75 – which honestly, I see as the utter maximum of a rookies range. I’m also assuming that he’ll be in your team for 5 weeks, since that’s approaching the end of upgrade time.)
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I’ve been asked a couple of times recently about trading now so I feel that it is time to put something out there.

Sure, this article won’t be as long as the last one – however it will open that same way.

Then I asked the question, what makes a winning team? Now I ask the question, what makes a good trade?

Funnily, the answers to both questions are the same.

A good trade scores you the most points.

So whenever I think of making a trade, the question I like to ask myself is: How many points will this trade make me over the season?

When discussing this, it’s important to understand the implications of Points per game (ppg). To examine this, we’ll look at a case study.

Say I have Martin, who is averaging 70. I decide that I want to trade him up to Bartel who is averaging 110. Firstly I’ll need to free up the cash difference between Martin and Bartel, so we will need to trade our other Cashcow, Jetta, down to a rookie priced player. We can then use that cash to turn Martin into Bartel.

So what we have now, is two trades netting us an additional 40 ppg (or 20ppg per trade.) however, you’ll also need to consider the timing of the trade. Making that trade in round 6 will score you an extra 320 points over the season (20ppg * 16 rounds). However, making that same trade in round 11 will only score you and extra 220 (20ppg * 11 rounds) over the season.

This is an important concept to visualise, because an injury to a premium, with no coverage, is going to cost you 110ppg.

So in the above case, you would be just as well off covering a 2 round injury rather than scoring a 40ppg upgrade from one of your rookies. And is why saving trades for the end of the season becomes important because as you keep getting injuries, a two or three week injury could be a much wiser place to spend your trades.

Of course, having bench coverage changes the maths in that a bit meaning you would need Bartel out for 4 rounds before a trade would be more beneficial.

So, how does this theory apply to actually trading? (over the break)
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It’s at that pointy end of the pre-season. After all the NAB games have been played. You’ve been tweaking your team for what feels like an eternity and it’s finally rolling around to lockout.

You’ve pawed through training reports, analysed stats, read a million opinion pieces on why such-and-such will have a good year, but have you picked a good team?.

Whether you are a new player or a seasoned professional, the dynamics of a team is often the side of SuperCoach that is most often overlooked.

So, what makes a winning team?

Some will say picking the right rookies is the key, others will tell you that value players are where it’s at. Some believe that captain selection is the be all, while others might say your bench. Some believe that your trading strategies are what will bring home the bacon while others believe that it’s all a case of lady luck, blessing your players with a purple patch and others with an ACL.

It’s a very simple question, but for everything that people say is required to win SuperCoach, it has a very simple answer- A winning team scores the most points.

It’s a simple truth that often gets overlooked, but can have a profound effect on selecting your team.

Yes, all those points mentioned above are all important parts of making a winning score, however, if you’re seriously planning to have a real stab at winning, you’ve got to consider how all of those parts will come together to score your team the most points.

And more importantly, you need to get yourself a strategy, from day 1, that you will try to implement through the year.

So, where do you begin?

(This is a very long post; see the rest over the break)
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Why use TooSerious?

So, why is TooSerious one of the biggest fantasy football support sites on the internet?

To answer that, you’ve got to ask yourself the following question: What makes for a good year in Supercoach?

Two things play a huge part in your year.
1) Your starting squad.
2) How well you trade throughout the year.

So, how can we help? Well firstly- your starting squad. We have made it our duty to provide excellent analysis of which premium players will do you well, which mid priced players look to be stepping up and which rookies will give you the best chance to cash up.

Ok, so I would love to take *all* the credit for that, but we’ve also got a fantastic array of writers on board as well as a fantastic community backing it up. Just take a look through the comments, any of them really, for an inciteful and intellegent discussion on Supercoach.

Now, while we offer advice, we also have a tab up the top there called stats. Under here, you can find a history of every player playing the game- as well as snapshots of how they were going in years gone by. We’ve got the usual stats as well as your more fantasy specific stats like highest/lowest salary/points. Standard deviations as well as handy “average against” including a players last 3 game average over the past three weeks, against the team they’re coming up against and at the ground they will be playing at.

Now, I’m hoping that that will be enough to get you a decent starting squad. But once you’ve got one of them, the rest of your season will come down to Team Management. Which is the area that we shine.

The first place to look is over on that stats tab. Over there, the first thing to notice would be the breakeven column. This column informs you what score a player will need to get in order to hold their current salary. Next are the salary movement fields (next round, Two Rounds, Three rounds and Movement (3 rounds)). These fields will give you a fairly accurate approximation of a players salary if they manage to get their average. I say fairly accurate, because salary movement cannot be perfectly predicted because it depends on what the league scores in relation to their salaries. Needless to say though, it is accurate enough to get a great idea on which players to jump on.

However, if this isn’t enough, next to every player, you will find a little calculator. Clicking here will enable you to enter your predicted score for a player, for the rest of the season, in order to see what effect that will have on their salary. This can be a fantastic tool for working out when a player is reaching their peak, or bottoming out.

And as we all know, Supercoach is won by trading out your cashcows when they are at a peak price and trading in your premium players when they are at their lowest.

Outside of that, there’s also other handy stuff that pops up. You’ve got the ability to enter in your team which will help you track injuries as they are updated round to round. (players are coloured in red when injured and orange for the rounds that they are due back (because we all know that not everyone comes back when they are supposed to; Ottens and Stevie J say Hi) – check out the last few years, with the exact cause and duration of the injury availiable when moused over). When I’m not lazy, I’ll get the teams entered in each round so you can easily see which of your players have or haven’t been named that week.

We also have the gameday pages. Here we have a pre-game page for each game (which can be a fantastic tool when selecting a captain (well if you don’t have Ablett.)). Here you will also find our live scoring which will track your team as well as the scores from every other player out there.

So there you go, a quick synopsis on how using TooSerious will improve your game, both in the preseason and throughout the year.

And of course, since we are constantly evolving, we’re always open to suggestions on how we can improve this place for you all. So if you have any ideas, or even if you would like to try your hand at writing an article or two, then drop me a line.

Showing my chronic lack of time at the moment, my first Supercoach lesson is going to be an interview.

By someone else.

Of a Dreamteam specialist…

But! The concepts are very similar and translate fairly well to Supercoach.

It’s done by those folks over at DreamTeam ruined my life (watch the swearing… ), and is an interview of legendary Dreamteamer- Skankdanker.

As one of BigFootys “No-Passangers”, he’s put together consistant high-ratings for a number of years. Plus he’s an all-round nice guy.

So don’t take what he’s saying lightly. He’s excellent at this game.

Some of the topics to take note of are-

Starting strategies
– Rookie/Gun vs Midpriced.
– Value picks.

Rolling averages
Trading

Study it well. The advice is golden.

And there will be a test afterwards…