GW6: The difference between been a good result and a good decision

Haaland

• Congrats to those who triple-captained Haaland! We said TC was a reasonable choice but we (based on our risk appetite) kept the chip hoping to do better - but it'd be difficult to beat his 16-point haul.
• The decision on triple captaining Haaland last week reminds us of this quote by billionaire Howard Marks on the difficulty of telling if a risk assessment is correct:

"Did the investor do a good job of assessing the risk entailed? That's a good question that's hard to answer... Think of the weatherman. He says there's a 70 percent chance of rain tomorrows. It rains; was he right or wrong? Or it doesn't rain; was he right or wrong? It's impossible to assess the accuracy of probability estimates other than 0 and 100 except over a very large number of trials."

• TC for Haaland was a good outcome. Was it a good decision? Burnley took the game to 1-1 at half-time, and Haaland's two goals occurred in injury time.
• It's an important question to be clear about, because we can't control if a single player in a single game will produce a good outcome but we can work on making good decisions - and improving our judgement calls is what will improve our FPL game and other parts in our lives.

Gabriel vs Timber/Calafiori

• Gabriel similarly scored in the last minute of the game despite Timber/Calafiori taking more shots and chances in the game.
• We believe our thesis from last week still holds - it's more profitable to have an Arsenal fullback than centreback in your team. If anything, the thesis is now more valuable (if more people buy Gabriel instead).

Grealish

• We warned after Grealish's haul on GW3 that buying him was more risky than people realised - he is since on his third consecutive blank, mid-way of the six fixtures that we highlighted.
• Good decisions will pay out over the long term.
  

FPL90cents team

• Our 59 points were above average by 13 points, although down in rankings to 196,050.

• We're satisfied with the situation: we expected a bigger hit from not using TC given Haaland's haul - and it's better to have good decisions than good results!
• Our main learning points are more focused on mistakes that are less chance-based but could be avoidable - whether we could have picked out Doku earlier (he looks to be a better asset than Foden/Reijnders as things stand); and how we should have listened better to the signs/analyses on Porro getting rested.

We encourage our readers to reflect on your own teams (and perhaps leave a comment!) on how your decisions could have been better, and how you'll apply this next time.

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