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FPL Chips offer a great chance to earn more points in Fantasy Premier League, but you need to learn how to use these better than anyone else.
Fantasy Premier League is back for the 2018/19 season and there are no significant rule changes to the game ahead of the new campaign. This means that the three chips available to managers have been retained.
These are:
- Triple Captain
- Bench Boost
- Free Hit
Through the course of the article, I will be sharing my thoughts on the best time to use these chips for maximum FPL gains, But before we go any further, here are some acronyms that FPL managers need to familiarize themselves with:
- DGW (Double gameweek) – A double gameweek arises when a team has had a fixture postponed due to weather or involvement in domestic competitions. In this situation, the player from the respective team will have two fixtures that gameweek instead of one, which means he effectively has two chances to earn you FPL points.
- BGW (Blank gameweek) – A blank gameweek is when certain teams do not have a fixture for that gameweek due to their or their opponent’s involvement in domestic cup competitions, such as the League Cup final or the FA Cup quarter-finals.
Keeping the above in mind, let’s start analyzing the best deployment tactics for the three chips mentioned above. Do note that you can only play each chip once, and you cannot play more than one chip in the same gameweek. They also cannot be used the same week as your wildcards.
1) Triple Captain
The simplest and probably least powerful of the three chips, the triple captaincy allows you to triple your captain score instead of doubling it. Conventional wisdom has been to use this chip in a small DGW when only two or four teams have DGW fixtures and not in the larger DGW.
This allows you to get 180 minutes from your captain pick (assuming he is not rotated), which not only means more opportunities to pick up points, it also means that the lowest you can score is 12 (4*3) and it also allows you to rack up double bonus points.
However, there is a case to be made for using it in a plum single gameweek fixture – Salah scored 57 points against Huddersfield at home last season, the same amount that Aguero did in Manchester City’s double gameweek. This is more of a gamble as simple probability dictates that the more minutes your captain is on the pitch, the more chances he has to register FPL points.
Effectively, this chip allows you to field 13 players (10 + 3* captain pick) in any given gameweek. If your chip strategy requires deploying a chip in a single gameweek, this is definitely the one.
2) Bench Boost
The bench boost chip allows you to field your entire squad of 15 players in the chosen gameweek, instead of the usual 11. It goes without saying that a bench full of starters is necessary to even consider using this chip.
The benefits of using this chip in a DGW are evident. As mentioned in the triple captaincy, using it in a DGW would mean each of your players are likely to score at least four points, which would mean a minimum score of 60 unless they are booked or substituted early.
If you used it a single gameweek, the minimum they would score is 30, so the benefits are already obvious. Moreover, the possibility of having 15 players play 180 minutes, a total of 2700 means the potential for a massive FPL points haul is massive. This chip effectively allows you to field 32 players ( (14 players + 2*captain) * 2) and is the most powerful chip available to FPL managers. The ideal time is to use it is in a big DGW where there are budget options from smaller teams to choose from, as these will be crucial to a strong bench.
These DGW likely materialize towards the end of the season, and ideally, you should time your second wildcard just before the bench boost DGW as this will allow you to build a squad with all the latest information.
3) Free Hit
Introduced only two seasons ago in FPL, the Free Hit basically gives you a wildcard for that gameweek only. You are allowed unlimited transfers once the chip is activated, and your team will revert back to its old state after the completion of the gameweek.
Unlike the other two chips, this cannot be canceled once activated so managers should be careful before deciding to deploy this chip. Although it may seem tempting to activate this chip when the top teams have a good set of fixtures, this chip shows its true power in a BGW.
Teams like Manchester City, Liverpool, etc. often progress far in domestic cup competitions which leads to them not having a Premier League fixture that weekend. This means that someone like Salah would play zero minutes in your team that week, but would play as usual the next. There is absolutely no sense in wasting transfers to ship him and buy him back but at the same time, you cannot have a 12.5m asset just taking up a major chunk of your budget without delivering.
The Free hit allows you to buy players from the teams that feature in that truncated BGW and still have Salah in your team for the week after, a win-win.
