How to make the most of your SuperCoach trades

Picking a starting squad is just the first part of the SuperCoach season. After Round 1 is when the real strategy starts, and how you use your 30 trades will determine your fate in 2019.

Sam Walsh and Marc Murphy of the Blues.

Picking a starting squad is just the first part of the SuperCoach season.

Once we have survived the stress of Round 1 lockout, the first weekend of matches is done and our teams are locked away, this is where the real strategy starts.

We are allocated just 30 trades to use throughout the season to improve our squads. How we use these trades is what will make or break our sides in 2019.

INSIDE INFO: FIVE TRICKS TO BOOST YOUR SUPERCOACH SCORE

ESSENTIAL GUIDE: ROUND 2 TRADE TARGETS

THE PHANTOM: WHY YOU SHOULD KEEP GRUNDY, GAWN

SCORE SPIKE: WHAT WAS BONT’S MATCHWINNER WORTH?

WHEN TO TRADE?

Once the game opens up at the end of each round (usually about 9pm Sunday) you can start making your trades.

These trades are reversible until the start of the first game of the next round (this is commonly known as the “Heath Shaw rule” after an indiscretion resulted in his suspension on a Friday morning when most people had already traded for that week). Once the round has started any trades you make are locked in and can’t be changed.

A popular strategy with the rolling lockout is to wait until the last opportunity to make your trades so that you have all the available information before you pull the trigger. Also, if there is a significant late out over the weekend and you haven’t used your trades yet you can use one to fix this issue rather than have a potential doughnut that week.

AVOID TRADING IN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS

Prices only change after a player has played their third game of the season, so we get a couple of weeks to see how someone is performing before having to make a call on them.

Keeping this in mind most experienced SuperCoaches will tell you not to panic in the first two weeks if someone is underperforming. The only trades that astute coaches will make in the first two weeks are for a long-term or season-ending injury.

Clayton Oliver was disappointing in Round 1 but back him in to rebound this week.

ROOKIE CORRECTIONS

If you have selected a rookie-priced player (under $200,000) that has a poor first round or you have missed one that had a blinder, don’t jump just yet! Wait until that second game is played — you never know, that terrible or fantastic score may have been a one-off resulting from their role, it could have been that someone else was missing from the side or just their opposition that caused their score. After that second round then you have more information and can make a better decision about who to bring in and who to drop out.

We’ve seen players score big in their first game and fall flat or, worse, get injured in game two. So hold fire if you can.

After Round 2 is when you see what we call “Rookie Corrections”. This is where you make those final adjustments to improve your side.

PLAYING THE BREAK EVEN GAME

For those new to SuperCoach, the break even is the score that a player must reach to maintain their current value. This is a crucial number when we are looking at rookies and when to move them out of our teams.

Once a player’s break even is getting close to their average or beyond it, this is usually the trigger for us to trade them out because it is likely that their price will start to drop the following week or at least not go up. This is when we cash them in to a new rookie and use that extra money to trade out another maxed-out rookie and bring in a premium player that ultimately improves your team — the classic SuperCoach one-down, one-up double trade.

When trading in rookies look for players “on the bubble” - guys who have played two matches and are about to shoot up in price.

But it isn’t just the rookies that we need to keep an eye on the break evens. We need to keep an eye on those premiums that have had a couple of down weeks and have a low break even so that we grab them before their value starts to rise again.

You can see every player’s break even in the SuperCoach Stats section of the website - click on “players” and select “break even” from the gold menu.

If Sam Walsh can score as he did in the pre-season, he will reach a maximum price of more than $400,000.

BYE WEEKS

The bye weeks can cause headaches for your team but are a big opportunity for us to maximise our scores. We do this by trading out players that haven’t had their byes yet and bringing in those that have already had their week off. This will only work after the first week of the byes, of course.

Once Round 12 is complete you need to consider those players that have their byes in Rounds 13 and 14 in your side — especially rookies who have maxed out in price. You want to trade one of them out and bring in a player that has just finished their bye in Round 12 and will play every round for the rest of the season. This allows you to maximise your scoring across the bye rounds.

Fremantle (Nat Fyfe), Hawthorn (James Sicily, Jack Gunston), Port Adelaide (Justin Westhoff) and the Western Bulldogs (Marcus Bontempelli) are among the teams with the Round 12 bye so you can look to target these players to bring into your team for Round 13.

During the bye rounds we can use three trades a week which helps with this strategy.

FINALS TRADING

Hopefully by the time you reach the SuperCoach finals you have a few trades up your sleeves. At this time of the season you are more likely to need to use those trades on season-ending injuries or based on your league match-up. But this is a topic we will cover when we get to the end of the season.

In summary, trades are valuable and you need to make sure that you get as much value out of each and every trade you have as they run out faster than you think. Happy trading!

You can follow Paul Dunn on Twitter @pkd73 and hear more of his tips on the SuperCoach Coach podcast.