Discussion Your Ten Commandments (Rules) of SuperCoach

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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your beers,

As the sun rises on another season of SuperCoach and the permanent residents of the beautiful, restful haven referred to affectionately by those in the know as the BF SC Forum brace themselves for the influx of out-of-towners in search of the keys to unlock the secrets to SC dominance and mythical intestinal robustitude in matters of piss sinkage, it is wise that we all pause to reflect on just what it is that might bring us that insight, that moment of revelation we seek.

The Australian summer has lain in wait as it does every year, attempting to lure us in and see us crash on the rocks with its insidious siren song and derail our SC seasons before a shot has been fred in earnest.

We’ve been regaled with stories of #scottyfrommarketing and his lion-hearted endeavours to lead the battle of the bushfires from the front with complete disregard for his personal safety, himself having been trapped in the hellish warzone that is Oahu at the time:
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Scotty beingg forced to drink cocktails with his captors. Blink twice if you need help, big fella #Staystrong ScoMo #sobrave


We’ve been inspired by Bridget Mckenzie’s displays of unbridled honesty, impartiality and propriety:
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Great stuff, kids! Now let’s do some colouring in. Black for the grants in safe ALP seats, green for the LNP marginals, gold for anything with gun clubs & polo

And been genuinely impressed by Nick Kyrgios’s personal growth (genuinely, he may end up regressing and losing focus again, but he got up off his clacker and did something for bushfire victims, showed some real maturity, the Kobe tribute was a nice touch and even in his ultimate loss to Nadal didn’t just throw in the towel when he got behind in the fourth set, he stayed lock in, got himself back into it and went down swinging – hats off to the bloke)
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But those are all sideshows. Distractions designed to get us barking up the garden path and heading down the wrong tree, or something like that.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to try to set forth the ‘ten commandments’ of SuperCoach. I might not get there with work etc. and I don’t really know my arse from my elbow, but the main point is more to stimulate your cortexes, to get us pondering paradigms and to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls that can see us go from being War Admiral to Rear Admiral (one for the Seasbiscuit devotees), to have us taking ourselves out of the game by not controlling the controllables.(RIP Rossy :()

Feel free to go with your own ten, the idea is just to talk / think a bit of strategy.

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Thy dominance shalt start with thy planning of thy starting squad
Might have overdone the ‘thys’ there just a tad. You can’t win SC by nailing your starting squad, but you can lose it by making unnecessary blues. Some of this is very general, but there are some basic principles it’s probably worth stating, even though many will be fully across them.

Plan around the cows:

The realty is, none of us have our starting squads nailed down because none of us know where our rookies / other cash generators are going to come from.

And how many of those ‘absolute premo locks’ we’re going to be able to squeeze in on what lines will in part be determined by which rookies we’re going to be starting on what lines. An example:

Some will have been thinking about starting an Isaac Heeney in the forwards at F3 (let’s say behind Whitfield at F1 and Dusty at F2) , hoping that this will be the year in which he genuinely breaks out and goes closer to the 102-105 mark many think he is capable of.

But with his thumb injury setting the cat amongst the pigeons, and depending on how the FWD and MID eligible rookies fall (Rankine, McAdam, King, Cockatoo, Darcy Cameron, a bargain-priced Stephen Hill as part of a swingset with a Jordan Dawson down back, maybe a Benny Cavarra etc.), you might be better off looking at a skinnier FWD structure with only F1 and F2 premos and going a premo heavier in the MIDs

In the interim, make sure to include some higher-priced potential cash cows (rookie-priced players who’ve been in the system like Stephen Hill, Cockatoo, Ben McKay, Brandon Starcevich. If lower-priced rookies present, great, it frees up cash to spend in the gift shop, if not, you’ve already got the higher-priced rooks and don’t need to make cuts or compromise by downgrading a pick you had your heart set on.

Once the preseason comp has been run and one, strip your side right back, plug in the cash generators you need and re-plug the premos in around them. You’ll still have your locks (e.g. Grawndy R1/R2 as potential non-negotiables for some) and by placing the rookies first, you'll know what's left for the rest.

Don’t overemphasize the power of the POD:

PODs are great and it can be one of the most fun and rewarding parts of the game when it’s your low ownership uniques getting you across the line in your league and / or seeing you rise in the rankings. But picking PODs for the sake of picking PODs is a high-risk strategy with downside potential. There’s safety in numbers and having a decent overlap on the most commonly held durable, consistent premiums you think will be amongst the top players in their line across the year is a good way to avoid getting caught behind the eight ball. You want to fail in the group and excel on your own, not the other way around.

Pick the players you think have the best chance of fulfilling your purpose for them, regardless of ownership levels, and limit your PODs.

I got caught out being prepared to take on too many PODs (actual starters and negative PODs I'd faded) last year. It is a risky strategy and tough to pull off.

Understand the concept of value:

SuperCoach pricing is based around a ‘Magic Number’ (MN).

The basic principle is that the Total Price Pool (TPP, the sum total of the cash values of all listed players) remains constant throughout a season.

At the start of the season, the MN is around the 5.4k mark (to calculate it for yourself, just take a couple of player starting prices for non-discounted premos and divide them by last year’s average).

But it has to drop in the course of the year, because the rookies coming into the system are all priced based on unrealistically low average expectations (a 124k rookie is priced at around 23 points, e.g., and not even SC royalty like The Rock of Goat-Balta in his blue period before his inevitable march to glory, Connor Makesmespew and other rookie luminaries actually average 23 ppg).

So their prices skyrocket. To offset that, the sum of established players’ prices needs to sink to offset. The mechanism for this is the MN. The magic number gradually reduces over the course of the season, typically ending at around 4.9 – 5.0k per point. 2019 for example looked a bit like this:

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The important thing here is just to be clear that there is price decay, so try not to compound it by starting too many picks with limited upside

I’ll try to cover price movements and the formula to calculate them in more detail at another stage, but the main take-away is that all established player starting prices carry an element of inflation. This can be compounded by a player having a tough early draw (like a Jacobs / DeBoer tag in early doors).

Looking a bit closer at a player's stats often helps. Barron von Crow did a great job on twoitter of digging a little deeper into Rory Laird's stats over the last few years.You might look at the data and draw different conclusions, which is fine, the main thing is just to see that digging a bit better sometimes unearths things you might not have otherwise noticed.



So ideally, you want to look for premos that you think will finish near the top of their position and have value upside over other options in the line who you think are priced at their absolute peak and / or who might get away to slower starts and be better off as upgrade targets.

One example might be Josh Kelly vs Clayton Oliver. Kelly has had a lot of durability issues over the journey (and every game he misses is a game you’re paying for premo output but not getting it because you’re plugging in a rook or a midpricer to cover him). He managed 14 (admittedly pretty bloody stellar) games at 117 and enters the season priced at full whack, having received no discount. This doesn’t scream value. By comparison, Oliver has proven to be very durable (he made the start of the season, played every game and managed a respectable 110-odd average despite two off-season shoulder recos).

This is a subjective assessment, you might see it differently, but for mine, Oliver comes cheaper, has proven himself more durable, has genuine upside potential in a rebounding side and off a pristine preseason, so I would rather start Oliver and spend the savings elsewhere than chasing the white whale that is a Josh Kelly 22-game, all-universe output season. (It’s the 22 I’m worried about, bloke’s a star.) Chasing that elusive uninterrupted JK full season might just see you ending up like Captain Ahab, being dragged down into the depths of the ocean as old Moby Dick takes you on a one-way trip to Davy Jones' Locker.
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Give yourself flexibility – but within and with a reason

The potential for swingsets is often beguiling. We dream of being able to fling a premo with DPP around from one end of the ground to the other by pairing them with a lower price option with matching DPP. And this year might present some options, for example a Jordan Dawson / Stephen Hill swingset.

Don’t overvalue the possibility of DPP flex. The rookie won’t be there forever, the premo needs to be able to live up to their premo status in the line on total pts.

Floating Donuts and Captain Loopholes

If you are going with a dedicated floating donut in one rookie position, the best place to do it is usually via a kid with RUC/FWD DPP at R3. This year, Charlie Comben (NM) looks like being a decent option, e.g..

If a decent R3 cash cow presents (like a Sammy Draper maybe around midseason), then you can always trade out a FWD rookie, swing Comben down and plug Draper in at R3 for a while. And having a Comben at R3 gives you the option of going with Darcy Cameron as a FWD rookie if he gets a run early and gives you the bonus of potentially having Grundy handcuff strategies should he miss games, e.g..

Normally, it’s a bit of a waste starting a DPP floater MID/FWD on the MID bench to be able to fling them around with a DPP FWD (e.g. Dusty), e.g., because you tend to get more point production and / or cash generation from the MID line and foregoing that might see you behind the pack.

Anyway, enough for now, will try to post another topic in a few days if possible.
 
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I'm not a big fan of political comment invading the SC forum, but aside from that this is a great idea for a thread with some excellent opening comments. I particularly like the commandment about the concept of value. So many people argue that value doesn't matter and that it's all about the best possible scores, but they're dead wrong. It's all about value.

I've come to agree with the one posted by Leftyitis. I've often been sucked in by the high previous seasons average of a KPF but although their occasional massive scores are tempting, their regular terrible scores can absolutely ruin your round. It will be those consistent smaller forwards who get regular midfield time I'll be picking from now on.

My own commandment would be … "Only pick a mid-pricer if you really believe he'll score well enough to be a legitimate keeper." I know many will disagree because they like the idea of using mid-pricers as stepping stones to a premo keeper, but it's a risky process and more often you're far better off starting with a premo and a rookie rather than 2 mid-pricers.
 
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Always go with your gut & try not to overthink your team leading into round 1 lockout

Don't pick Tom Rockliff. EVER AGAIN

Don't pick players who can't actually kick the sherrin. Dunkley i'm looking at you :moustache: Dark Sharks

Always pick the KOTD types like Bont, Heeney, Romo etc

Sad times considering the likes of Ablett, Pendles, JPK & Jelwood are now yesterdays heroes from a SC point of view

Did I say Billings F1? YEAH BABYYYYY

Here2tellyouwhy
 
My top 10...
  1. Floating donuts are vastly overrated - if there is a rookie ruck getting games start him over Comben. In general by pure virtue of a rookie getting dropped or injured you'll inevitably have one by R3. Ruck cover + extra cash generation is worth more than the extra round or two everyone else gets with a loophole (remember how B. Scott from NM was dropped after R3 last year? Imagine if ROB or even a ruck rookie half as good was named R1 and you passed because you wanted a loophole).
  2. % owned is irrelevant when picking your starting team - you should be picking the best players, not the most unique. Your overall team will be unique (even if many of your players are highly owned) and it will be increasingly unique throughout the year based on trading.
  3. Never have a never again list - you're letting emotional responses get in the way of logic - inevitably people miss out on good options due to never again
  4. Trades are worth ~$150k
  5. If your mid-pricers aren't going to finish top in their position or earn ~$150k+ then don't start them
  6. The biggest reason a players score increases dramatically is opportunity. Whether this is midfield time, or simply returning from injury and being able to play more games/game time. When looking for forward and defender break out options you should be looking for players who will be getting opportunity to score more - this is true for both young players and old players (e.g. Dunkley and Boak)
  7. When listening to advice - consider whether they are playing for league or overall. Many podcasts or websites don't adequately disclose who their advice is aimed at and if you're goals aren't aligned you can make some really bad moves. In general league players want pure guns n rookies and can play a little bit slower earlier on to max out team value. Those playing for overall need to upgrade more aggressively and earlier on due to the compounding effects of being one upgrade ahead of everyone else.
  8. Speaking of podcasts - My top 5 to start 2020 1. Supercoach Insider, 2. Supercoach Elites, 3. Supercoach Take, 4. Dr. Supercoach, 5. Supercoach Coach
  9. Hold is gold - Once upgrades start (Round 4-5+) through to the byes its usually never better to sideways trade an under performer or someone that's injured for a week or two compared to just doing your normal upgrade. Only trade if your premium has a season ending injury
  10. Ceiling and floors are vastly overrated - it really doesn't matter for most players. When looking at your starting side: Ceiling only matters for potential VC's and C's. Low floors only really matter if you want to not start someone because you believe you'll be able to pick them up later for the cheap. Apart from that you're picking for their yearly average.
 
TLDR; soz kent don’t have that much free time.

Rules to follow if you want to succeed.

1. never post when pissed drunk.
2. Ryan griffen and rocky should never be traded into your team.
3 post as many scar jo gifs/pics the pg police allow you.
4. KPF are a no no
5 rage trade
6 the Ruffy in Ruffy out back in trade is acceptable
7 nobody else is allowed to use my Michelle jenneke gif
8 your allowed to post/hang s**t on north and the doggies because both teams are just irrelevant.
 

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1. Rockliff is a trap
2. Always pick the best of best to start
3. Mid pricers suck
4. Pick CDs KOTD kings as soon as possible
5. Never pick north rookies
6. Punchable is a trap
7. If your thinking of starting to play SC for the first time......DONT!
8. Seriously dont. Just log onto pornhub instead.
9. Puppies are great and should be posted as much possible
10. Do not listen to anything I say. I suck at SC.
 
1. Rockliff is a trap
2. Always pick the best of best to start
3. Mid pricers suck
4. Pick CDs KOTD kings as soon as possible
5. Never pick north rookies
6. Punchable is a trap
7. If your thinking of starting to play SC for the first time......DONT!
8. Seriously dont. Just log onto pornhub instead.
9. Puppies are great and should be posted as much possible
10. Do not listen to anything I say. I suck at SC.
With regard to points 7 & 8.....why not do both?
 
1. Don't get financially attached to a mid-pricer who you've put in your pre-season team because of a January injury to a proven premium.
It's likely that the injury will be exaggerated and hyped up. The premo will line up Round 1 and you'll be stuck with bugalugs instead because your team balance has been thrown right out, based on a false economy.
Example: Gawn, down to Jacobs.

2. Watch all preseason games.
You need to be selecting rookies from what you've seen, not from what you've heard.

3. Prioritise your rookies according to scoring potential, not position.
If say, 4 rookie's performances on a single line (def or fwd) in the preseason demand 4 on-field spots, and there's also 2 rookies for bench cover, then don't be afraid to go in with only the 2 remaining spots for premos. Invest elsewhere.

4. Don't leave the top proven best scorers on each line on the shelf, thinking you'll pick them up when they're cheaper.
They're most likely going to be cheaper at some point, but the points are lost to you.

5. DPP's don't necessarily have to be married up in your starting side.
The DPP player is not 'stranded' without a partner, but can instead be a key to unlock a door through the act of trading.

6. A template, or a 'cookie cutter' team is not a bad thing as a starting side.
Your trades throughout the season will determine the contrasts, as the timing of trades and placement of players will form the variables, and 'points of difference', that will distinguish your team from the others.

7. Trading during the rolling lockout of round 1 is different to any other round's trading.
Don't panic and settle for a rookie who's been selected in an early game simply because you're not sure if your preferred rookie will be selected in a later game. Trust your research and if worst comes to worst and he's not selected, then consider picking him anyway if he was one of the better rookie performers during preseason. Many of the better rookies have missed round 1, only to be then selected for round 2 and onwards.

8. Unless for long term injury, avoid trading after round 1.
It's better to have the limitations of only two trades after round 2, before the price rises, than to have used all four trades before round 3.

9. Don't be afraid to cull a rookie early, before they reach their optimum price.
If another rookie is on the hump, grab him, or a fallen premium is within range, execute.

10. Aggressive trading until full premo, then conservation until the end.
 
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Pick your team on the first day you are able to, then make a myriad of changes day to day until round 1 starts - preferably on hearsay, rumour and innuendo
 
Pick your team on the first day you are able to, then make a myriad of changes day to day until round 1 starts - preferably on hearsay, rumour and innuendo
I just copy the most cra-cra campaigner I can find on here from my alias account :drunk:












P.S. this is not my alias account :moustache:
 

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