#FPL musings... In the interest of improving our (my) decision making and by virtue our FPL play I think it's important to reflect. I do not make this post to say X was wrong or X was right. I would also add that after 3 weeks we still know next to nothing, it can all change yet. I bring some examples only to highlight my point, there will be many others and many examples that actually did play out how you antipated, whether they were heavily favoured by the masses or not. "Watkins is a must own, hes in form from pre season, never looked sharper, fixtures are great" "Bournemouth are in trouble, they have sold their entire backline" "Chelsea have lost Colwill, they will be bad defensively" "Spurs were one of the worst defences last season, same players, wouldn't go near" "Forest just know how to keep CS, a defender is must own with those games" "Palace will struggle with those fixtures and will be vulnerable due to extra games in Europe" I could go on and on. These are just some of the narratives I saw spoken about in pre season. Again I am not saying eveyone felt that way, hell I'm not even saying any of these theories are wrong, they may yet go on to be true. What I do think is important is to have an awareness of some the crowd theories/noise but to abilty/skill to cut through some of the noise. It's far easier mentally to get wrapped up in theories than it is to use the tools and hard numbers in front of us, particularly if they appear counter to what you hearing (guess this depends what circles your musing in). People seem to forget that if the crowd believe something, much of that is captured in markets already. There is always a human desire to attach reason for outcomes, we dont like random, we like order. It's fun to do so and again why wouldn't you try? But the reality is that often, shit just happens. Despite all this, a bad pick can score well. A good pick can blank. How well the team is playing doesn't necessarily matter. We have variance not only in points but referee decisions/injuries you name it. A huge part of the skill in this game is the acknowledgement that luck plays a large part, the results dont always reflect the process. If it did, the game would be extremely easy. As I have come to learn, FPL is about putting yourself in a position to win more than you lose. Its impossible to win them all without huge amounts of luck. People will always be able point to individual cases on players and thats great if you had a theory and it worked out but the skill is not to kid yourself that you had god given foresight, for every one of these there are 100s of people who had similar convictions and got it wrong or a bad outcome. The only part we can control is the process behind the decision and that's where I'll continue to try to focus my attention and energy. ✌️ Happy/Sorry for you.