A brief update

Happy holidays everyone; it's been a while. For those not on Twitter, I was away in Costa Rica over the break without much - if any - internet access hence the lack of posts around these electronic pages. Well, actually, that's only the main reason, not the only one. In truth I've become a bit disillusioned with the fantasy game the past couple of months, partly due to my other commitments which make copying data at 2am somewhat less appealing, partly due to a lack of excitement in this year's game and finally due to the constant frustration I have with today's internet culture.

This blog is a labour of love and aside from the small amount of money I made from the pre-season guide many of you graciously purchased, I don't get much out of this beyond the enjoyment of interacting with readers and hopefully helping a few of you to gain a couple of extra fantasy points every now and then. While some of that enjoyment remains, I feel it has waned over time and there's only so many posts you can write whose only comments are nit-picking spelling mistakes or challenging your whole approach without any kind of factual basis before you start to question why exactly you are doing what you do.

I like to consider myself a man of science (particularly that of a dismal nature) yet in reality I lack the discipline of a true scientist who can keep going with failure after failure in pursuit of some defined goal. Though I'm somewhat old fashioned compared to some of my peers, one miserable attribute I have inherited on my Generation Y chromosome is the need for 'results' and while the current iteration of the model is reasonably good in this area, pushing it to the next level of accuracy is going to take a significant amount of work (if indeed it's even possible). The development of such a model follows the path of many other projects where the returns of the initial investment are vast but then diminish over time. As a clunky analogy, I've picked up the gold nuggets lying on a river bed, or drilled the top layer of oil, and all that remains is to get very dirty with heavy machinery that will take years to get even a fraction of the progress enjoyed in the early days. This probably also follows something of the 80/20 principle where 80% accuracy was achieved with 20% work and now I'm faced with doing 80% of the work for only a 20% improvement (and in reality it's probably more extreme than that).

Anyway, this all won't mean much as things will essentially carry on as they have over the past couple of weeks. I will continue to update the data tables every week and post a gameweek preview but I'm taking a break from the research side and thus the number of extra posts will decline. I might suddenly be inspired and rattle off a post every day for a week but right now that looks unlikely and I wanted to be honest with you all, most of whom have been incredibly generous with your support of this site over the years.

I will continue to be somewhat active on Twitter so please feel free to get in touch there (@plfantasy), though if it's to criticize the results of the model, I'm almost certain to not respond (again, I'm not a real scientist so no peer review here).

Thanks for your continued support and hopefully I'll be back with a vengeance when I feel I have something worth saying.