MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
By: The Fantasy Physician
With ten weeks of Fantasy Strategy Clinic articles under your belt, you are starting to get the hang of this game. Look for good matchups. Find the strong players with high floors and ceilings on the teams with those good matchups. List out the players in the positions you are interested in. Get a lineup together. On Monday morning after the game unlocks, you do just that and then start to gather more information about your picks. Maybe you listen to the MLS Fantasy Insider Podcast or hop on the MLS Fantasy Boss Discord to see what other thoughtful players have come up with. Lo and behold, some squads look almost exactly like yours. And that makes you wonder: is this an affirmation of sound thinking and analysis? Or is your thinking just conventional and unimaginative (or even naïve)? How are you going to improve your rank if your squad looks just like every other managers’? Should you take players “just to be different?”
Grappling with these questions, you are now delving into what the community that discusses these things call “Chalk” and Differentials?
What is “Chalk?”
Last week 97 out of the top 100 managers had Evander on their squads and most of those (68 of those 97) had him captained. We say then that in week 10, Evander was “chalk.” Per The Athletic, the term originated in the world of horse racing in the pre-digital era; favored horses were listed on a chalkboard so that the ever-changing odds on them could be rewritten as bets accrued. Collectively, “chalk” represents the set of players with high actual or projected ownership in each week based on a widespread high expectation of their chances to provide a good return in fantasy points. Good managers – without consulting each other – mostly know who the chalk players are based on simple knowledge of the players with the highest averages and the rudiments of their matchup qualities. As awareness that Lionel Messi – ordinarily the chalkiest – was likely to rest between midweek games in a difficult CONCACAF Champions Cup semifinal home-and-away, Evander’s ownership and captaincy only grew; he was the standard bearer for week 10 chalk. Kai Wagner, playing in defense against a defanged DC United, was also chalk. Chalk in a given community of managers also evolves as managers discuss the merits of certain players. The choices of important opinion leaders – such as the hosts and guests on the MLS Fantasy Insider podcast, the writer of the weekly Positional Rankings article, and others – may further refine the list. The rational or irrational conversations in the Discord may influence chalk further. At each position, the number of chalky players may exceed the number of slots managers have available.
There is mathematics to chalkiness. Simple ownership percentage is part of that, though the ownership percentage listed in the FMLS game can be misleading because so many managers do not change their teams week to week (so called “dead teams” or “zombie teams”). Popular among players of the Fantasy Premier League game, I learned this week, is the idea of “effective ownership”** which – within a group of managers of interest (e.g. the top 100) – is calculated as the sum of the ownership and the captaincy rendered as a percentage. In the example of Evander and the FMLS top 100 from last week, with 97% ownership and 68% captaincy, his effective ownership (EO) was a whopping 165%. Very high EO has certain important implications for the risks and benefits of not having a player or having a widely captained player on one’s squad, uncaptained. Because the FPL game does not have unlimited transfers week-to-week as does FMLS, stable ownership helps managers quantify the risks in particular of not owning the high EO players. A good discussion of EO in the FPL game can be found here. Even though FMLS rules make it harder to estimate EO, the concept applies equally. High EO players are one example of “chalk.” Writ large, “chalk” is that list of players that managers understand will be popular picks in a given week.
Good Chalk and Bad Chalk
Stoicism is a characteristic of the successful FMLS manager (so many ups and downs to weather!) and so consulting the wisdom of stoic philosophers periodically can only add. In his “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius said, “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Notably, he does not specify whether sanity lives in or outside the majority. To put it in FMLS terms, there can be good and bad chalk. The word chalk itself carries a modest pejorative connotation in some circles, as when it’s used to dismiss one manager’s “great idea” as not that special because most managers would naturally have come up with the same great idea. I have often felt that there is a particularly American bias against conventional thinking that compels some domestic FMLS players to eschew chalk to a fault. You want to take players who will get high scores regardless of whether a few or a lot of other managers have that same player. So “good chalk” is a good thing because you want high scoring players and you do not want to miss out on them. But equally important is avoiding (a popular term for that is “fading”) bad chalk. Bad chalk may represent players who appear strong but whose prospects that week – perhaps due to subtle injury, a stout opponent, fatigue from midweek matches, or even misanalysis of a matchup – undermines their apparent potential for high FMLS point returns. A good manager can do very well picking an all chalk team, in part because there may be more fairly high ownership players than there are slots, and a particular set of choices among them can outperform.
Differentials, Good and Bad
The opposite of chalk, a differential player is one with low ownership whom a manager thinks is undervalued or likely to “go off” in a good way unexpectedly. Sometimes in medicine and in FMLS, it’s a good idea to consult specialists and experts. Two members of our Discord Community, Tyler Norman (@Ranchinator on Discord), expert player and the lead author of the weekly DifferRanchals article, and top player Megan Turner (@Meg on Discord) who has built an extraordinary start to her season on the back of inspired differential picks, stand out out for their expertise in this area. I asked them what they thought about taking differential players.
Tyler said,
“In my opinion, a differential is a player who is not a commonly picked player in any position. This includes the top 7 mids/def and top 5 fwds…. Another way that I look at it is picking the “secondary option” to a common pick. For example, Messi is the common pick, but Suarez is the secondary option. Differentials are obviously a risky thing to do. That is why most of the time if you [want] to have a differential pick, you should put that player on the bench to see how they do compared to the rest of the “chalky” players. If they are on the bench, there is no pitfall in picking them. What makes one good? For me, it’s about recognizing what the matchup looks like. [Will} there… be goals (or a clean sheet) based on recent performances? I am someone who WATCHES lots of games. So if a player passes the eye-test for me, they likely will make it into my articles (and sometimes my team). I stick to 1-3 differentials per week. I try to stay on 1-2, though. …Overall, the most important thing to consider when picking a differential, though, is to GO WITH YOUR GUT… If you have a feeling someone is going to play well, pick them up. It doesn’t matter if the general public doesn’t like the pick. Your gut is telling you that’s the play.”
Meg said,
“I define a differential as a player [with] lower ownership. Another term I kind of use loosely is a ‘shadow player’- so for example Valakari over Dreyer a few weeks ago or maybe Qasem over Mukhtar etc. The star player is who everyone expects to rack in the points, but if your gut says otherwise, take the punt. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Just because everyone is talking high about the “chalk player” doesn’t mean the one in his shadow isn’t going to outperform that week. Another big thing to consider when choosing a differential is a matchup that really presents itself as a point generator. If you’re taking a differential attacker, target weak defense or [teams] missing key players … If taking a defender, you’re looking for … weak attack [or one that is] missing key players etc. I utilize my bench every week for differentials.”
Implicit in taking a differential player is the decision to fade a chalk player in most cases which is to say that differential plays are really about a pair of decisions: identifying the bad chalk and pivoting to a more optimal choice to maximize points.
Chalk and Differentials in Week 11
Week 11 poses challenges because there are relatively few favorable matchups, but that opens us up to lots of possibilities, especially among midfielders. In lieu of specific choices, your week 11 prescription is to identify broad chalk first from your own intuition and then come up with reasons why some chalky players may fail to return points, ie Messi might be too tired from all these CCC games, Hany Mukhtar did great last week but potentially won’t repeat on the road, Anders Dreyer won’t do as well now that Chucky Lozano is back from injury, etc. Likewise, come up with a few differential plays, but emphasize in your notes why they will have a great week. If it helps, make a list by position
Then at the end of the week (but before matches start!), revisit the MLS Fantasy Boss website and check out the Positional Rankings and also the DifferRanchals article–both great ways to identify who is chalk and who are considered differentials. Look at where your choices do or do not appear on those lists. Who’s it going to be?
** I am indebted to Mohammed Hassan of Cairo, Egypt and our Discord community (DeeB in FMLS) who took pains to kindly and patiently explain EO to me.
The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
