Read on for our guide on how to play your chips. They could prove the difference between winning your office mini-league or finishing below one of your colleagues, who used auto-pick and never so much as glimpsed at their team again for the rest of the season.

Before we get on to the chips, you need to know about double and blank gameweeks.

Double gameweeks see teams have to play two English Premier League matches within the same week, usually due to fixtures in other competitions. They tend to occur toward the end of the season and this should be the case at week 33 and week 36 of this season.

Also, Uefa Champions League winners Chelsea have the added obligation of the Fifa Club World Cup this season so will be even more backed up.

Before that there are plenty of international breaks in the English Premier League calendar, which means blank gameweeks.

One final note, you can only use one chip in any single gameweek.

Wild Card

This is the big one, the king of the chips, if you will. This chip allows you to rip it up and start again, something that many real-life managers must be jealous of.

You get one in each half of the season but you need to use them before they expire and you must use the first wildcard before 9.30pm on Tuesday, December 28, 2021.

Top managers often use the first in the early part of the season – somewhere between week four and week 10 – so plan your team for the first four gameweeks, which will also end with the first international break for English Premier League clubs.

The second international break comes at gameweek seven or eight so that is another prime opportunity to use it as the league will have taken some shape but it is not too late to claw back grandma’s early season lead in the family mini-league.

Free Hit

This allows you to shake up your line-up for just one gameweek and it can be used at any point in the season. After that gameweek, everything goes back to as it was before the chip was activated.

Again it is often best employed in a double gameweek to maximise its potential impact and loading up with whatever fixture mismatches are drawn up.

Selecting this chip allows a player to make unlimited transfers for one week at no points cost, so you can keep your stars and build around them.

Bench Boost

This allows your benched players to score points – rather than sit there and do nothing but take up valuable budget.

Some managers swear by playing this in the first game week though many others will suggest to do it after the second wild card – that way you can make sure that you can pick 15 players who are free of injury, suspension and the rotation frustrations of the FPL managers who choose Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City players. If you do not do it soon after a wildcard, then players being out is a risk.

Triple Captain

Captains ordinarily score double points but this chip ensures your skipper’s score is tripled for one gameweek.

There is no hard and fast rule for when this is employed, but most managers tend to captain star strikers or the strikers that the game considers to be midfielders – like Liverpool’s Mo Salah.

Keep an eye out for when your stars are drawn at home against the team that are adrift at the bottom of the league.

One thing to remember with all of these chips: use them or lose them.