Golden Result Strategy

Once per gameweek you can mark one prediction as your Golden Result. If it comes in, its points double: 20 for the exact score or 6 for the right result, instead of 10 and 3. A wrong result still scores nothing, and the star locks when the gameweek's first fixture kicks off.

So far 101 golden picks have been scored. Of those, 39 (about two in five) scored nothing, 50 (about half) scored 6 points and 12 (about one in eight) scored the full 20. On average a golden pick earned 5.3 points, against 1.8 for an ordinary prediction.

83% of golden picks backed the outcome the crowd favoured, compared with about 61% of all other predictions. Only 11% of golden picks were draws, against 29% of everything else, even though 29% of fixtures so far have finished level.

That caution shows in the results. A golden pick landed the right result 61% of the time (62 of 101), against 41% for other predictions (625 of 1,543). The exact-score rate is a little higher for golden picks too, 11.9% (12 of 101) against 8.4% for the rest (130 of 1,543), but a dozen hits is too few to read much into, and four of them came in a single week (see below). The gain comes mostly from choosing a fixture where the result looked clear.

A safe pick isn't a guaranteed one. Golden picks that scored points, by gameweek:

• Gameweek 1: 15 of 22 (68%)
• Gameweek 2: 12 of 17 (71%)
• Gameweek 3: 12 of 17 (71%)
• Gameweek 4: 4 of 22 (18%)
• Gameweek 5: 4 of 7 (57%)
• Gameweek 6: 5 of 6 (83%)
• Gameweek 7: 6 of 6 (100%)
• Gameweek 8: 4 of 4 (100%)

Gameweek 4 was the worst week for golden picks: only 34% of all predictions got the right result, and half the fixtures went against the crowd's favourite, including Chelsea 2-2 Hull and Liverpool 0-0 Fulham. Most golden picks backed a favourite, so a week like that hurts them most. Read more about it in the Gameweek 4 roundup.

The last two weeks went the other way, and they show how golden picks bunch together. In Gameweek 7, five of the six golden picks went on Manchester City v Ipswich, a game every player had backed City to win, and City won 3-2. In Gameweek 8, only 32% of all predictions got the right result, yet all four golden picks went on Arsenal v Everton, 12 of the 13 players who predicted it backed Arsenal, and all four golden picks predicted exactly 2-0, which is what happened. That is why the star looks so good lately: players had all spotted the same banker.

Across the eight gameweeks, 171 player-weeks (a player who made at least one prediction in a gameweek) produced 101 golden picks. That means around 41% of the time the double-points star went unused. The highest take-up was Gameweek 4, at 76% (22 of 29 players), and the lowest was Gameweek 8, at 25% (4 of 16).

It costs nothing to set one, so it's worth checking. After you save, open My Predictions to confirm your star has saved against the fixture you meant.

• Choose on the result, not the scoreline. Only about 1 golden pick in 8 turned into 20 points. The typical payoff is 6, so pick the fixture where you're most sure who wins, or that it ends level.
• Don't treat the favourite as safe. Golden picks paid between 57% and 100% of the time in seven of the eight gameweeks, and only 18% in Gameweek 4. If several favourites look shaky, that is information too.
• A banker everyone picks gives you no edge. If the whole pool stars the same game, your 20 or 6 is matched by everyone else's. A clear result others aren't starring is worth more against the other players.
• Draws are the rarely-starred option. A golden draw that lands also counts towards the correct-draws tiebreak (step 4 in the tiebreak rules).

This is eight gameweeks and 101 picks, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a rule. We'll update the numbers as the season goes on.