The Transfer Market – buying players

The transfermarket in hattrick is based on a auctioning system. From the day a player is put on the trasferlist, a deadline of 3 days exactly from that time will be set. There is no way to bid on players not on the transfermarket, and there is no way to buy a player until the deadline of the auction has passed. The team with the highest bid when the deadline passes, will buy the player. If a bid is put on a player within the last three minutes of the deadline (which will happen frequently), the deadline will be extended with the time of the bid + 3 additional minutes. This is made so to protect you and give you enough time from to decide if this is the player you really want, and then raise and hope the other manager gives it up.

Things to keep in mind

• Managers tend to bid for players when deadline is close
• Between the time someone overbids you and you raise that bid again, other managers can bid. You might have to race against several other managers.
• You will get a hattrick each time someone overbids your bid, but you will get no warning if someone raise a bid which is not yours

Timing

The ultimate time to bid for a player is exactly 3 minutes before the deadline passes, that way the deadline will not be extended, and it can go unnoticed by some managers. The longer you are competing in a bidding war, the bigger the chance of a third or forth manager gets an eye up, and starts bidding themselves.

The time of the day also matters. There are far fewer managers online during the night (Eastern Central Time , but also a lot fewer players). Usually there is alot of managers online in the morning before work or school (08:00 – 09:30), during lunch hours (11:00 – 13:00), when managers get home from school /work (16:00 – 17:00) and just before bedtime (in the hours between 22:00 and 24:00). Combined these make up  most of the day unfortunately. A very good time would be at 18:00 christmas eve! ;)

Strategies

When you have found a player you are interessted in, there are some smart ways to behave. And some rules to follow.

1. Determine a limit of how much you are willing to give for this particular player. Remember you are interested in revenue, not the player itself. There will _always_ come a similar chance. Believe me. Find a maximum fee, and never, ever go over it. Discipline man!
2. Never enter a bidding war. Ever. Its just too hard to come out of. If someone overbids you. Bid the maximum amount and no more. If he overbids you, you are smarter than he is, in the long run.
3. If there are more than two bidders, you don’t want to be there. Get out.
4. If someone overbids you and there is a long way to your maximum amount, bid in the last minute of the deadline. Annoy him. Make it take time and raise by the minimum amount. Then after a couple of 2-3 rounds of overbidding, raise a lot (your maximum price). If he haven’t given up during the sparring of bids, and does not now, well you are smarter than him.
5. Never bid on a player ‘just to get a message if someone overbids you’. You are raising the price! Think about it. He will find the player regardless. You just minimize your own chance of revenue!

Other good ideas

Become a hattrick supporter. The developers deserve it. Its not much money we are talking about. You get bookmarks! Bookmarks are your way to making it a whole lot easier on yourself. If you cant be online all day and remember to bid, use the e-mail warning function and keep your e-mail client looking for mail as often as possible. You can search and bookmark up to 50 players, and wind up getting only one. But that player will be your way to lady fortune!

Don’t buy a player because of his name, or his cool picture. Stick to the facts. Except if his name is Ryan Giggs. Then i’ll forgive you.

Age subskill

You will see age displayed as x years and y days. This is rather important. A player of 18 years and 1 day, has 113 days left to train with the speed of a 18 year old. A player of 18 years and 110 days has 2 days left. And price will go down alot when a players age ‘pop’. This is a weapon you should use, as many more have learned the trick. When a player, under the age of 24, is about to become one whole year older, the price will drop significantly. This is why alot of people, and you should two if you make a mistake, list people when they are approaching 100 days. Even if he has not ‘popped’ in the skill you wanted, he is worth more now without the pop, than he is with the pop and one year older.

Dont buy players about to age up

If the player is more than 80 days over his current main year, chances are he wont pop until aging and you will not earn as much as you planned to. Do try to buy players that have just aged, if they are about to pop. You can get them fairly cheap, and after the pop you will get a nice revenue.

Transfer compare

A fast way to see what the player you have setteled on buying is worth is to use the transfer compare tool, and see players with similar TSI and the same form. This gives you an idea what your max amount should be less than. Less than! Remember, revenue! What people often miss in transfer compare is the age of the player. Simply because it doesn’t show. The price difference between a 17 year old under 20 days and a 17 year old more than 80 days is idiotic. It might be 35 000 000 for a solid playmaking solid passing for the first player, and 5 millions for the latter. Because by the time that first player reaches 80 days, he will be excellent on his way to formidable. Worth a fortune. You want those kind of players, but you need some (hehe) hard cash first. So use transfercompare with this in mind. If you narrow down your player purchaces to players not passed 50 days, and you get players under the average price for someone with similar skills, form and TSI, you could sell him for just the profit, and many do. If you could get him to pop, and then sell him, you’ve got the idea.

A lifeline of a lifetime

Then last but not least. I am now confident that you have read and understood every single point in this guide. If you have not; stop here, go back and read it again until you do.

There are tools to help you. One of which could help your brain alot if you do it right. Namely; PsicoTSI. This is a firefox plugin. It is completely legal. And it will make your day a hell of a lot easier (excuse the language).  You can download the latest version from: http://www.aldeaglobal.net/psicotsi/lang-en.htm. There is also a post that explains how it works at http://bobymoore.blogsome.com/2007/01/13/understanding-psicotsi/.

PsicoTSI

What this tool does is to add some information to any completely visible player (your own senior squad or on the transferlist), and calculate the main skill subskill for you.  Behold a new world! You can now, with a glimse of an eye, see which players are likely to pop soon. Without doing that whole comparing players with same secondary skills, but different main skill, like in my previous examples. However it has three groups; High form (excellent, solid, passable), Average form (inadequate, weak, poor), Low form (the rest).

This tool is much more accurate for players in the middle of each group (solid and weak mainly). So I tend to buy players with solid or weak form only. The average of the groups. And in my experience solid is the most accurate by far. One thing you can also notice is that the skill for a solid player (7) can have 8.06, meaning he is estimated to be an excellent player. This is the perfect player to  buy. He will pop within 2 weeks of training almost guarranteed.

Dont buy players with a subskill lower than 75 (ie. 6.75) in his form group.

Chances are he will take 4-5 weeks with a passable trainer, or even a solid one. Why can some players be calculated to be excellent even if he is listed as solid right there? Well his secondary subskills might be high. You never know if a player has recieved 3 weeks of passing training and his TSI has increased because of that. So this tool can also fool you into believing a player is going to pop sooner than he will. Because of high subskills. Which is why you shouldnt buy players with lower than .75 PsicoTSI values. The real subskill could be closer to .50 if you are unlucky and you are looking at a player who will age on you before you get the proper revenue.

Summary

You should now be able to get pretty good signings. At least you wont ever loose your investments if the maximum price, age tip, PsicoTSI tips, form tips and transfer compare tips are used. It will limit the numbers of players you want significantly, but hey, remember; we are playing to win. And winning is fun. :)

I will do a complete first step guide for new managers shortly, and also a guide for your first purchaces just to get started. Stay tuned.

TSI – the peekhole into a players soul

TSI or Total Skill Index is what hattick use to summerize how good a player is in total. The exact formula is a ‘secret’, but many attempts to break the code has been made.

Lets look a bit behind the scenes;

Assumption: The following skills are used to calculate the TSI value; keeper, playmaking, winger, scoring, defending, passing, form and stamina.

Actual skills (subskills)

Skill levels are not actually 0-20. A player wont jump directly from passable to solid, he will have to work his way up from 6.00 to 6.99 before popping. That means there are 100 different levels of any skill. Subskills is the term used to describe this behavior. The bad news is that hattrick only shows the main skill (presented in text or levels 0-20), his actual skill is hidden. The good news is that there are several ways to spot if a player has a high or low subskill. The one I wont mention is that the subskills are used during matches. So two players with what seems to be identical skills, where the first have high subskills and the other low subskills, the first player will recieve more stars inthe game (provided their form and stamina is also the same).

TSI indicate subskill levels

So a skill is represented in hattrick as x.xx, where x is any number. What we know is that the skill,subskill is used in the formula to calculate TSI. AHA! So investigating the TSI will tell us alot about the real skill, not only the visible value. Thats good to know. Thats an important aspect in order to ern more money than anyone else, because you will know which players are about to pop, and which has just popped. But I have to warn you, this is something you will need time to get the grasp of. lets go o with TSI investigation.

Form and Stamina

These have a huge imact on the TSI. If you are a new user, I reccommend purchasing only players with passable or solid form and stamina. There are just too many unknown factors for you to keep in mind. As you grow more comfortable with TSI I will add some notes in how you can also exploit these skills. But for now lets look at the regular skills only.

What about Set-Pieces?

Set pieces has no effect to a players TSI.

The formula

In a easy world the TSI would be calculated as follows: sum(keeper, playmaking, winger, scoring, defending, passing). But it is not as easy as that.

Weight

TSI does not increase in a linear fashion with skilllevels. This means there is no even increase when going from ie. passble to solid as from solid to excellent. The better the skill, the higher the TSI increase. High skills count more then lower skills.

Lets look at some example 18 year olds, with solid playmaking, passable passing, weak defending and solid stamina. All have passable form for comparison reasons:

Player 1 (TSI: 2080) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 5 Passing 6 Scoring 4 Price: 3 999 990	Player 2 (TSI: 1500) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 5 Passing 6 Scoring 4 Price: 3 000 000	Player 3 (TSI: 2070) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 5 Passing 6 Scoring 4 Price: 3 750 000
Player 4 (TSI: 1370) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 4 Passing 6 Scoring 4 Price: 2 800 000	Player 5 (TSI: 1440) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 3 Passing 6 Scoring 3 Price: 10 000 000	Player 6 (TSI: 1360) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 3 Passing 6 Scoring 4 Price: 2 490 000
Player 7 (TSI: 1220) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 7 Winger 3 Passing 6 Scoring 3 Price: 2 200 000	Player 8 (TSI: 2290) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 8 Winger 4 Passing 6 Scoring 2 Price: 10 000 000	Player 9 (TSI: 2430) Keeper 1 Defending 4 Playmaking 8 Winger 5 Passing 6 Scoring 2 Price: 8 000 000

Case player 1 vs player 2 vs player 3

These players have _identical_ skills and the maximum difference in TSI is 2080 vs 1500 = 580. This strongly indicate that players 1 and 3  are much stronger than player 2 in playmaking, in other words, their subskill is much better. Consider now players 8 and 9. These have already reached excellent playmaking, but the search criteria is the same. Notice that player 8 has a scoring of 2, but since that skill is quite low, it should not affect the total TSI much. The TSI difference between player 8 and 1/3 is only 210/220. This indicate that players 1 and 3 are actually very close to popping, and player 8 has just popped. These two would have been very good prospects for buying and selling after 1-2 weeks of playmaking training. Players 2,4,5,6,7,8 and would not be good as they would need extensive training for may weeks before actually popping and give you the renvenue you need.

What about player 5?

The open eye will also spot player 5 as a possible prospect. His winger and scoring skills are quite low (weak), but compared to for example player 7 his TSI is much higher, actually higher than player 4 and 6 as well, even though they have better skills. This indicate that the players main skill and its subskill is somewhat higher. There is still too much difference between player 5 and 1/3 to be sure of his fast popping. But he could be a ok choice as well, especially if you could get him quite cheap.

Summary

That concudes the first part of TSI investigation. But this will be a subject I will get back again and again. TSI is a summary of the players total skills. You can use TSI to determine the difference between players and a player hidden subskill.