Thursday, May 15, 2014

Fantasy Football: Premier League season fantasy game recaps


The Premiership season is over and Man City have come away as champs, having overtaken a stumbling Liverpool at the line. This also means that the Fantasy Football season is over! How did you get on this year?
Me? Not so well! I paid for not jumping on the Saurez bandwagon, I put in Yaya Toure far too late, plus I stuck with DeGea in goals when United clearly weren't at the races anymore. But you live and learn. I did a short synopsis of which games I was playing this year and what I thought of them earlier in the season, so now I will give a brief rundown of where I placed in each competition.

First lets have a look at the two predictor games that ran over the season.
In Sky Sports Super6 I ended up with 311 points, that's 93 correct results and 25 correct scores. That all leaves me in 39,848th, which isn't that bad (I did forget to input predictions for one week!), there must be nearly one and a half million players? I also scored better than all the Sky Sports pundits, that's always a plus!
In the Talksport Predictor game I ended up with a score of 1945 and in 17,210th place. I was as high as 3,431st about two thirds of the way through, but again I'm pretty sure I missed a number of games and screwed myself over. Of the 18 Talksport presenters, I beat all bar three. Mickey Quinn was best with 2070pts. I believe there was over 120,000 playing the game in total.

The two main Fantasy Football games I concentrated on were Official Premier League Fantasy Football and Yahoo Fantasy Football. But as the season went on, Yahoo kept being dogged by problems and in the last week I don't even think I changed my team. Some weeks I didn't change my team, but that was because Yahoo wouldn't let me! It really has taken a nose dive this season, but anyway......
In Yahoo I ended up with 3610pts and in 29,715th place. I don't know how many players played in total (I'm guessing the drop off rate was huge), and I have no desire to try and find out. Yahoo has gone from probably the best Fantasy Football games to perhaps the worst. Let's move on.
Nothing demonstrates the mistakes I made this season than my performance in the Official Premier League Fantasy Football. I ended up with 1,832 pts and in a woeful 1,629,716th place. To give you a taste of how bad it was all season, just think on the fact that I had Altidoe and Anelka as two of my forwards in week 1! I try and aim for at least a top half finish in every game I play, but here I was 20,261 places from the halfway mark. Not a huge amount in a game of over 3.2m players. Still, next season is a must do better.

The other Fantasy Football games I played, I'll be honest, didn't get as much attention, so I was kind of dipping in and out of them as time allowed. In ESPN Premier Fantasy my points came to 2,060 and I was in 15,734th place. I think the ESPN game had over 110,000 players, but I stand to be corrected on that.
In Metro Fantasy Football I finished up in 27,142nd place with 17,814 pts. I didn't really keep an eye on this team over the season. The game looks nice, it just wasn't my cup of tea. Metro Fantasy had nearly 75,000 players.
Telegraph Fantasy Football was another game I dipped in and out of. it wasn't a bad game, and is maybe one I will put more effort into in the future. I think I will see how the Telegraphs fantasy World Cup pans out. But as for last season I ended up with 1,539 pts and in 95,807th position.
The Sun Dream Team didn't get much play time from me. One, because I don't read the Sun, and Two, because of the rather awkward way it implements transfers. But still, I ended up with 1197 pts and in 809,582nd place. There will be a Sun World Cup Dream Team too, so hopefully that will be better.

The last two games I played, I did put some effort into (but not too much!). The first was Australian website Sportal Premier League Dream Team. This game is different in that you play against another fantasy team every week and accumulate points every time you beat your opponent. Win, lose or draw is the order of the day here. I played in two public leagues, coming 3rd in one (29 wins, 9 losses) and 9th in the other (21 wins, 1 draw, 16 losses). Overall I ended up with 4,256 pts and in 3,622nd place out of 13,809 players. It is a fun way of doing a league and I would recommend giving it a go next season.
In Sky Sports Fantasy Football I also had two teams running. But none were very good! The best I managed was a total of 1,934 pts and in 68,278th position. I just don't like the system the game is run to, captain changes mid-gameweek etc.

So that's it for this year. I will do a preview of a number of Fantasy World Cup games by the end of the month, and hopefully I can put a squad together to challenge the top of the table. It would give great confidence going into Fantasy Football 2014/15. If you have any Fantasy game recommendations, then please tell me in the comments below.

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