Six of the ten matches in Gameweek 3 finished level. Most weeks that is a flat Saturday. This week it was the entire story, because Gameweek 3 was a Draw Means More round — a round where a draw is worth +2 instead of nothing.

FPG is simple: pick one Premier League team each round. If they win, you score points.

So here is the strange shape of the week. 118 players took part. Fifty-six of them picked a team that drew, and outside the two derbies that was worth exactly as much as picking a winner. The players who really cleaned up were the ones who got the derbies right.

The Picks That Paid Off

The derbies decided the top of the round. Crystal Palace won 3-2 at Fulham on Saturday at 15:00, and Arsenal beat Chelsea 2-1 on Sunday at 16:30. Both matches were flagged as derbies, and a derby scores differently: a win is +1, but a draw and a loss are both -1. There is no safe side of a derby. (More on derby weekends.)

Stack that up and a winning derby pick was worth three points: +1 basic (a win is +1, a draw 0, a loss -1), +1 head-to-head (you get +1 when the team you beat was picked by another player), +1 derby. Three was the best score anyone managed all round, and twelve players got there — six on Arsenal, six on Crystal Palace.

Outside the derbies, the two obvious results landed. Manchester City beat Coventry 1-0 and Liverpool won 2-0 at Ipswich on Friday night. Both paid two points, +1 basic and +1 head-to-head. Manchester City was the second most-backed team of the round with 15 picks, 12.7% of the field, and it did its job.

Then the draws. Brentford 1-1 Sunderland. Brighton 1-1 Leeds. Everton 2-2 Manchester United. Hull City 0-0 Aston Villa. Newcastle 2-2 Bournemouth. Nottingham Forest 0-0 Tottenham. Draw Means More turned every one of those 56 picks into +2 — exactly what a straight win outside a derby was worth. Pick a team that dug out a point, score the same as the player who backed Manchester City.

The Bankers That Bombed

Fulham. Seventeen players picked Fulham, 14.4% of the field and the most-backed team in the round. Fulham lost at home, in a derby. That is -1 basic, -1 head-to-head, -1 derby: minus three, the worst score on the board.

The other end of the Arsenal game did identical damage. Three players took Chelsea and walked away with minus three as well.

In total 26 players finished the round in the red, and 20 of them were on that -3. Set against 56 players quietly banking +2 for a draw, backing a side inside a derby was the single most expensive thing you could do all weekend. The most-backed team in the round produced the round's worst score. (Safe pick or differential — which actually wins more rounds.)

One more quiet drag on the round: 45 players had a point docked. A pick is docked -1 when it was auto-assigned, because you missed the deadline and the app picked for you, and your score would have been positive anyway. That is more than a third of the field giving back a point they had already earned. The Gameweek 3 deadline was Friday 4 September at 20:00.

The Lonely Pick of the Week

Nobody landed one. A lonely pick is +1 for being the only player in the game to back a team, and it only pays if that team wins. (How to use the lonely pick.)

Exactly one team was picked by a single player in Gameweek 3: Leeds. Brighton and Leeds drew 1-1, so that pick collected the +2 for the draw and nothing else. Every other team in the round had at least three backers. In a week where the field spread itself across all twenty teams, there was almost nowhere left to be alone.

Table Movers

Three rounds in, 118 players are in the table. Five of them are tied at the top on 10 points, separated only by goal difference, with another five one point back on 9 and four more on 8. The top fourteen are covered by two points.

That is what a Draw Means More round does. Ninety-two of the 118 players scored something in Gameweek 3, but only twelve of them beat two points. When a draw pays the same as a win, the week does not stretch the table — it squeezes it. The players who pulled clear did it by taking a side in a derby and being right.

FAQ

What happened in FPG Gameweek 3? Six of the ten matches finished level, and because Draw Means More was switched on, every one of those picks scored +2 — the same as a winning pick outside a derby. Arsenal and Crystal Palace winning their derbies gave twelve players the round's best score of three.

Why did Fulham cost so much? Fulham was the most-picked team of the round with 17 backers, and they lost a derby. A derby defeat is -1 basic, -1 head-to-head and -1 derby, so those players finished on minus three.

What is Draw Means More? It is a flag on the round. When it is on, a draw scores +2 instead of 0. Gameweek 3 had it on. It was not a double-point round, which is the separate flag that multiplies every score in the round by two.

How many players had a point docked? Forty-five. A point comes off when your pick was auto-assigned after you missed the deadline and your score would still have been positive. The full scoring maths is set out in the rules.

One pick a week. No squads, no transfers, no shuffling your bench at eleven at night — just one team, one round, and the small matter of reading a weekend better than everyone else. Join the table at fpg-app.com.

Written by Toby Gaskell, Founder of FPG