Fantasy Football Fix – Price Changes

Fantasy Football Fix – Price Changes

So, just how accurate are the fantasyfootballfix.com Player Price Changes?
Since we launched Fantasy Football Fix over six weeks ago, we have had a phenomenal response from the Fantasy Premier League community, both on the overall concept of our site and the range of features we provide powered by a mathematical algorithm, however we seem to be getting asked one question more and more…. ‘just how accurate are your player price changes?’.

Those of you that are die hard FPL Managers will know that due to a recent change in the code on the official FPL Site, it has become near on impossible for all of the current FPL fan sites to predict the risers and fallers.

So, what’s the maths behind the Price Changes?

Well, it’s common knowledge that prices changes are related to the number of FPL teams buying and selling a player. With this in mind, let’s define Net Transfers In (NTI) as;

NTI = (transfers in) – (transfers out)

The ‘transfers in’ and ‘transfers out’ information can be obtained from the official FPL site. In previous seasons, another number (called the transfer balance) was available on the FPL site, but has now been removed, which poses two key difficulties;

1. Relating the transfer balance to the NTI
2. Calculating the thresholds for rises and fallers

Last season, the threshold for a price rise was the same for the first, second, and third rise in a Gameweek. This year however, there are increased second and third thresholds, hence why there are fewer prices rises this season. The same applies for price falls.

There is also another key change this season, but we’d like to keep that information to ourselves!

We also have to consider that as the season passes, more and more FPL teams become inactive within the game as people lose interest, and FPL then compensate for this by changing the thresholds.

So, coming back to our first point, the transfer balance previously had some useful things automatically built in. For example, it would reset to zero after a price change, however now that has to be done manually for NTI.

You may have also have heard of the term `protection’ after a player’s status changes from injured to available. What this means is that the players transfer balance was frozen for a certain period, so again this now has to be adjusted manually.

The biggest difficulty however, and a common source of confusion, is that Wildcard transfers do not count towards the transfer balance. If you keep track of the number of price changes during international break, for example, when many Wildcards are played and there are many transfers, there are surprisingly few price changes. The upshot is you have to predict how many of the transfers have been made by Wildcards as these aren’t classified as a ‘transfer’, and won’t count towards increasing a player’s value.

The removal of this information has got all of us FPL nerds scratching our heads as to how we can now accurately forecast when a player will change in value.

So how are we different? Well, our entire site is powered by a unique algorithm which takes a different approach to predicting the FPL Price Change data. Our algorithm takes assumption sets from FPL user groups on the number of Wildcards played, then applies that information over all the FPL Data, allowing us then to accurately forecast how many transfers have been made by Wildcard, and how many haven’t.

Using this mathematical formula, we are currently over 80% accurate with our current projections of risers and fallers, and as we make the final refinements to our algorithm we are now just a few short weeks from being able to brag about having 100% accurate price change information.

So how should you use our Price Change information at the moment? Well, it’s pretty simple, as you need to check the progress bar, and see how close the player is to a change. At the moment our progress bar is around 10% accuracy, so for example, if a player is at 90% there is a chance they might change that evening (2am).

The closer the player is to the 100% mark, the more likely they are to change in value.

Once we have hit 100% accuracy on the price changes, we will be introducing a new range of features to give you Text Message and Email alerts for your player price change notifications, which you can setup for your Squad and Watchlist.

We would like to say a big thanks to everyone in the FPL community for your support so far including fantasyfootball247.co.uk, and all of our users for the great feedback provided.

Be sure to watch out our for a new Assistant Manager feature launching very soon, bringing a new dynamic to FPL Squad Optimisation.

The fantasyfootballfix.com Team

Thanks for reading Fantasy Football Fix – Fantasy Premier League 2014-15. This article was written by The fantasyfootballfix.com Team

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