How to Recover From a Bad Gameweek
It is Saturday evening. You check the results and your stomach sinks. Zero exact scores. One correct result out of ten. Your carefully considered predictions were absolutely demolished by a weekend of chaos. You have dropped five places in the league, and the person you least wanted to beat you is now two spots ahead.
Welcome to prediction games. This happens to everyone. The best predictor in your league has had weekends exactly like this. The question is not whether you will have a disastrous gameweek - you absolutely will - but what you do afterwards.
Step One: Do Not Panic
The single biggest mistake people make after a bad gameweek is overreacting. They throw out their entire approach, start making wild predictions to try to make up points, and end up making things worse. This is the prediction equivalent of chasing losses, and it is just as destructive here as it is in betting.
A bad gameweek does not mean your strategy is wrong. It means football is unpredictable. If it were easy to predict, there would be no point playing. One weekend of poor results tells you almost nothing about the quality of your approach.
Think about it mathematically. Even if you have a genuinely good strategy - one that performs in the top 10% of predictors over a full season - you will still have individual gameweeks that land in the bottom 10%. That is just how probability works. One bad week does not invalidate months of solid performance.
Step Two: Review Honestly
Once the sting has worn off - give it a day or two - go back and look at your predictions honestly. Ask yourself two questions:
- Were my predictions reasonable given the information I had before kickoff?
- Did I make any predictions that I knew were risky but went with anyway?
If your predictions were reasonable and the results were just wild, there is genuinely nothing to change. You made good decisions that happened not to work out. That will happen. If you notice a pattern - maybe you have been overestimating the big six or consistently getting a particular type of match wrong - then there is something to work on.
