If this is the first time you land on one of our Fantasy EPL Blogs, you might want to check out some of our original EPL blogs in my Medium archives to get familiar with how this project started and the improvements we’ve made over time.

What is New?

We used the free weekend, to add another new feature to our algorithm — Captain Recommendation Logic. The approach takes the predicted points for the upcoming game, probability that the player takes penalties, corners, or free kicks, a coefficient for the player’s aerial threat from the past 4 seasons, the likelihood of their team scoring 2 or more goals, and blends all of those in a normalized way into a** final captain_choice coefficient**. The coefficient is then discounted by an opponent_resistance score, based on the player’s next opponents adjusted FDR and normalized score for defensive strength this season. Example of what the Pandas DF looks like below:

Based on that formula, here is the list of the Top15 recommended captains for this GW. Lots of good options there, so not an easy choice by all means. If you want to play it safe, seems like KDB, Kane, Fernandes, Son, Salah and Vardy are some of the obvious choices, with Chris Wood interestingly coming up as the top choice, so if you have him and you feel adventurous enough to make him captain, this could be a nice differential play.

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