Chopped and guillotine league strategy

Lesson 1 of 7

What a chopped league is, and what everyone else calls it

Every week the lowest scorer in the entire league is eliminated. Not the loser of your head-to-head game, the lowest score of all of them. When a team is chopped its whole roster goes straight back into the player pool, so the waiver wire in week 2 holds a full team worth of startable players. There is no bracket and there are no playoffs. The manager still standing at the end wins.

Two more rules shape everything else. Trades are usually switched off, so your waiver budget is the only currency you have, and that budget is usually $1,000 and never resets. Nothing you spend in week 3 comes back in week 10.

What that does to the season is bigger than it sounds. There is no record to dig out of and no schedule luck to complain about, because you are not playing an opponent. You are playing the floor of the league, every week, and the floor rises as the weak teams are removed.

That picture is the format, and the two halves of it are the same eighteen rosters. Week 9 is the balance point: nine teams still playing and nine teams' worth of players sitting on the wire. From week 10 there is more talent available to buy than there is left in the league. A budget spent in September buys from the first bar. A budget held until November buys from the last one.

The same format under seven names

Sleeper launched Chopped in August 2025 and never uses the word guillotine. Guillotine league is the older generic name and still the one most people search for. Yahoo calls its version a death league, ESPN calls its version a knockout league, and the high-stakes sites have had their own for years. The rules differ in ways that change how you should play, so read your own league's before the draft.

• Sleeper, Introduction to chopped leagues
• Yahoo, Fantasy death leagues overview
• ESPN, What is a knockout league
• FFPC, Chop Classic official rules
• Fantasy Life, guillotine league waiver wire
• MyFantasyLeague, Chop Leagues
• NFFC, Eliminator rules

Death league, and the one name that means something else

Death league is Yahoo's 2026 branding for the same game, and chop league is what MyFantasyLeague and the FFPC call it. Survivor is the odd one out. A survivor pool asks you to pick one winning NFL team each week without repeating a team, and you are out when a pick loses. Sleeper runs one of those under the name Football Survivor. It has no rosters, no waiver budget and nothing in common with this format beyond the word.

Lesson 2 of 7

The rules of a guillotine league, in one place

Most of this format is four sentences long, and the rest is choices your commissioner made before you joined. Here is the whole thing, then the four settings that actually change how you play.

The four that never change

• One team goes out every week. The lowest score in the entire league, not the loser of a matchup. There is no schedule to blame and no opponent to scout.
• The chopped roster goes back in the pool. Every player on it, at once, onto the waiver wire. That is why week 2 has startable players on it and week 10 has a whole team's worth.
• There is no bracket and no playoffs. No seeding, no bye, no championship game in most formats. The last manager standing wins, and finishing second-last is worth exactly what finishing last is worth.
• Your budget never comes back. One FAAB allowance, usually $1,000, for as long as you survive. Nothing you spend in September returns in November, and trades are usually switched off, so it is the only currency you have.

Your team count is your season length

This is the rule nobody tells you and the one that decides most of your season. One roster leaves a week, so a league that starts with eighteen teams has seventeen chops in it and finishes in week 17. A league that starts with twelve is over in week 11, with seven NFL weeks still to play.

Every published team count is that subtraction. Yahoo advertises a thirteen-week public death league and runs fourteen teams. The NFFC Eliminator runs seventeen and deliberately stops chopping at week 13, so four teams are left for a total-points final. ESPN's own worked example is a twenty-team knockout league that ends with two teams alive and the higher score in the final week taking it, because twenty teams and eighteen weeks leaves exactly two. Nineteen is the largest league that can chop its way to a single winner inside a season.

The four your commissioner picks

These are the settings that differ between the leagues in lesson one's table, and each one changes something you would do differently if you knew about it.

Two more worth checking before you draft, because most advice you will read quietly assumes them: whether trades are on (usually not), and whether the league starts a kicker and a defense (several do not, including the FFPC Chop Classic). Sleeper's own published recommendations are eighteen teams, PPR scoring, a $1,000 budget and two injured reserve slots, with trades off by default.

Lesson 3 of 7

The only goal each week is not being last

Start with the arithmetic, because it settles an argument people have every August. Take a league of 18 teams and imagine, for a moment, that every team is exactly as good as every other. Then each one has the same 1 in 18 chance of posting the lowest score, which is about 5.6 percent. You survive week 1 about nineteen times out of twenty.

Keep going and the numbers stay friendly for a long while. If nobody is better than anybody else, the order teams get chopped in is just a shuffle, so the chance you are still alive after k weeks is the number of teams left divided by the number you started with. After six chops that is 12 of 18, or two thirds. After twelve it is 6 of 18, a third. At the end it is 1 in 18, which is the 5.6 percent you always had of winning the thing. Those figures are exact for equal-strength teams and no league is equal-strength, so treat them as the shape of the season rather than a forecast.

Here is what the shape tells you. In September, being average is nearly always enough, because the score that gets chopped belongs to a team with three injured starters and a bye week nobody noticed. Your job in those weeks is to stay clear of the bottom, and the way you lose is not by being the second-worst team, it is by having one disaster. A boom-or-bust roster can score more points than mine across the season and still be eliminated in week 4, because it is the variance that kills you, not the average.

Same points, different spread

That last sentence is the whole format, so it is worth more than my word. Here is the same simulator again, this time on eighteen rosters that all score exactly the same points per week. The only thing separating them is how far a given Sunday strays from that average.

Nothing about scoring explains any of that gap, because there is no gap in scoring. The steady roster is chopped in week 1 under one percent of the time and the boom-or-bust roster about one time in nine, and by the end of the season the steady roster has won the league roughly twelve times as often. Same points. Twelve times the titles.

Try it yourself below, and try the thing that surprised me when I first ran it: make the roster steadier and then make it worse at scoring. A steady roster scoring eight points a week below the rest of the league lasts about ten weeks. A boom-or-bust roster scoring eight points above it lasts about seven. Sixteen points a week of scoring, handed over, and the steady roster still survives three weeks longer and holds onto roughly the same title odds. In a format that only asks whether you were last, a quiet 95 beats a coin flip between 130 and 60.

Then the arithmetic turns. Every week the league removes its worst team, so the field you are measured against gets better and the lowest score climbs. Average is a safe place to be in September and a dangerous one in November, which is also the point in the season where the eliminated rosters have put real starters on the wire and your money can do something about it.

Lesson 4 of 7

Drafting for a chopped league

A normal draft is about upside, because a league season is thirteen or fourteen games and you can absorb a couple of bad ones. This draft is about not handing in a low score, ever, and the two goals pull in different directions often enough that a chopped board should look noticeably different from your redraft board.

Floor over ceiling

Draft the players who hand you a number every Sunday: the back who gets the carries whether or not the game script cooperates, and the receiver who still sees nine targets in a bad week. The deep threat who wins you a week in a head-to-head league is the same player who gives you a 3-point Sunday, and a 3-point Sunday in week 3 with sixteen teams still alive is how people get chopped in September.

Depth over stars

In an 18-team league the bench is short and the free agent pool at the start is bare, so a bye week or an early injury leaves you starting somebody who should not be on a roster. That is the disaster week. Two reliable starters are worth more here than one great player and a hole beside him.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that makes this format fun. Talent arrives every single week. Somebody gets chopped, their roster lands on the wire, and the best player on it is available to whoever bids the most. You can buy a star in October with money. You cannot buy back the week you scored 62 points because your third receiver was on a bye. Draft the base and buy the peaks.

Byes cut both ways

The published advice splits on this one. Jakob Sanderson argues for early byes: while the field is full the bar for last place is low, so a week with two starters missing is at its most survivable early. The case on the other side, which I lean toward, is that an early exit ends the season before any of your plan happens, and that by week 11 you will have replaced your bye-week starters with players bought off the wire anyway.

What both sides agree on is the thing worth acting on: do not draft a cluster. Three starters sharing one bye week is a scheduled disaster, and in this format a scheduled disaster is a scheduled elimination. Check the bye columns before you take your fifth and sixth picks, not after.

That is one week of scheduling, priced. Two rosters identical in all sixteen other weeks, one of them thirty points lighter on a single Sunday because three starters are off at once, and the chop risk in that week goes from about one in twelve to about two in five. Draft day is the cheapest moment you will ever get to fix it, and it costs nothing but looking at a column.

Kickers, defenses and the superflex case

Several chopped formats do not start a kicker or a defense at all. The FFPC Chop Classic lineup is a quarterback, two backs, two receivers, a tight end and two flexes. If yours does start them, take them last and plan to stream: they are the cheapest weekly upgrade in the format and paying real money for either is money you will want in November.

If your league starts two quarterbacks, the floor argument points straight at the position. Quarterbacks are the most predictable weekly scorers in fantasy football, and in a superflex league of this size the drop from a starting quarterback to whatever is left on the wire is the steepest drop on the board. The superflex guide covers how many to roster and when to take them.

Lesson 5 of 7

How FAAB works when rosters drop in bulk

The bidding itself works the way it does everywhere else, and the FAAB strategy guide covers that part. What changes here is the market around the bid. Four things about it are different, and each one pushes your number in a direction.

Your budget never resets. A thousand dollars is what you get for the whole season, and every dollar you spend in week 3 is a dollar you do not have in week 12 when the field is half the size and the players on the wire are twice as good. There is no next year, and in most of these leagues no trade to make instead.

Every surviving team is a rival. In a normal league, half the room has given up by October and will not bid against you on anything. Nobody in a chopped league has given up, because there is nothing here to give up on. You are alive or you are gone, and everyone alive wants the same players you do.

A chopped roster arrives all at once. You are not pricing one player, you are pricing a quarterback, two backs and a receiver who land on the same Tuesday and compete with each other for the same money. Decide which of them actually starts for you before you write a single number down, because the second-best player in that group is often the one nobody else prices properly.

And prices fall as the field shrinks. Fewer teams left means fewer bidders, and several of the teams still alive spent their budgets in September finding that out.

What our own chopped leagues paid

Every figure below is a winning bid measured as a share of the league's whole budget, which is the only honest way to add a $100 league to a $1,000 one, converted back into dollars of a $1,000 pot. These are anonymous aggregates from the chopped leagues synced into League Pulse, with nothing identifying a league, a manager or a roster.

Updated Oct 22, 2026, and rebuilt whenever the leagues behind it resync.

Two things in that top row are worth sitting with. The first is how much of this market is free: 25 percent of the winning claims cost nothing at all, because most of what a chopped roster puts on the wire is a bench player nobody else wants. The second is the other end of the same distribution. The dearest tenth of those claims cleared above $251 (25.1%), and that is from 21,925 claims, 374 leagues, 2025 and 2026. Almost everything is free, and the few players who are not are the season.

The rows below it are thin and you should treat them that way: between 30 and 50 percent left is 107 claims, 3 leagues, 2025, and under 30 percent left is 86 claims, 3 leagues, 2025. That is one room's habits rather than a market. Chopped leagues are new, most of the ones we hold have not played out that far yet, and these rows will mean something in a season or two.

What the published guillotine data says

Older, larger guillotine data sets say the same thing with better names attached. Fantasy Life recorded the median winning bid in its 2024 guillotine leagues on the same players as the field shrank: Justin Jefferson fell from $434 to $340, Derrick Henry from $424 with about eleven teams alive to $241 with about eight, and Amon-Ra St. Brown from $333 all the way to $76.

The NFFC Eliminator's 2025 figures put it in percentages of the budget. A top-twelve running back went for 28.9 percent while half the field or more was alive, 12.8 percent once between 30 and 50 percent of teams were left, and nothing at all below that, because by then the survivors had either spent their money or had no room to use him.

The stepped line is our own calculator's default, and the diamonds are the NFFC's published figures turned into the same kind of ratio. They were arrived at separately and they land on top of each other: the NFFC's 12.8 percent against its own 28.9 percent is a ratio of 0.44, and the number the calculator ships with for that band is 0.45. I did not tune one to match the other, and finding that out is the most reassuring thing that happened while I was writing this guide.

The one place they part company is the floor. The NFFC measured zero below 30 percent of the field, and our default still pays 0.15. That is deliberate: a measured zero is a room that had run out of money, not proof that a good player is worthless in week 14, and a calculator that returns nothing has stopped answering the question.

Two different data sets, one lesson. The same player is worth less every week the league gets smaller, so the question is never only what he is worth. It is what he is worth against what will be released next Tuesday, and against the money you will still have when it is.

Lesson 6 of 7

How much to bid in a chopped league

This is the question everybody asks in week 2, and the published answers disagree with each other, which is worth knowing before you take any of them.

The case for holding

Paul Charchian publishes pace targets for a $1,000 guillotine budget: still hold about $900 at the end of September, about $750 at the end of October, and about $250 at the end of November. The ledger of a 2024 champion published alongside them ran even tighter. That manager had $969 after week 4, $904 after week 8, $240 after week 12 and $11 after week 14. He spent almost nothing while the field was large, then nearly all of it between weeks 9 and 14.

Drawn together, the two lines say something neither number says alone. The champion was ahead of the target for half the season, holding 90 percent of his budget after week 8 against a target of 75, and then he went past it in the other direction and spent almost everything in six weeks. The plan is not hold. It is hold, then commit, and the cliff in the middle of that line is where the season was won.

The logic is the one the table in the last lesson shows. Early prices are the highest of the season and the players on offer are the worst, because a week 2 chopped roster is the worst roster in the league. Waiting buys the same shelf later at a discount, which makes it the aggressive move rather than the timid one.

The case against holding

Masters Fantasy Football argues for committing 20 to 35 percent of the budget in September, on the grounds that a roster good enough to survive is what buys you the right to spend anything later. Ben Gretch makes a barbell argument in his guillotine writing: spend early, when one upgrade genuinely moves your floor, and spend late, when money is about to expire, and avoid the middle of the season, where you pay real prices for marginal players.

Both objections land on the same weakness in a pure hold plan. A budget is only an asset while you are still in the league, and the manager who went out in week 5 with $940 unspent had the pace exactly right and is still out.

Where I land

Two conditions, and I want at least one of them before I spend anything real.

• He starts for me through the final week. Every Sunday until the league ends, rather than the one in front of me. A player who patches one bye is a minimum bid in this format, whatever he did last weekend, because the roster that gets chopped next week will probably have a better version of him on it.
• Or my survival odds this week are genuinely in danger. When the thing you are buying is not finishing last on Sunday, the price of the player stops being the point. A team on the edge of the cut should outbid a safe team on the same player, every time, and a safe team should let it happen.

With neither of those true, hold. The market you are waiting for is measurably cheaper than the one in front of you, and every week you survive takes another bidder out of it.

The danger ladder

Where you sit this week should move your number more than anything about the player does. Find yourself on this ladder before you bid. No percentages here on purpose: your league size, your scoring and who is left all move the real numbers, and the calculator prices them against your actual league rather than against a rule of thumb.

• Bottom two on the week's projections. You are bidding to stay in the league, so bid like it. The correct amount is whatever it takes to be the top bid on the best player who starts for you this Sunday, and saving money for a season you will not be in is the only real mistake available to you.
• Near the cut but not in it. Buy the upgrade that raises your floor, not the one that raises your ceiling. Pay a premium over what you think he is worth, because the alternative is finding out on Sunday afternoon.
• Middle of the pack. This is where the format is most often misplayed. You have no emergency, so bid on the season instead: only the player who starts for you every week from here, and only at a price that leaves you able to do it again.
• Comfortably safe. Let the desperate teams pay. Your money is worth more next week, when two of them are gone and their rosters are on the wire, and the only claim worth making now is the cheap one nobody noticed.

Those four multipliers are not advice, they are what the calculator actually does with your answer. End to end it is twice the money for the identical player in the identical week, which is the sharpest way I can put the point: in a chopped league, where you stand is a bigger input to your bid than who you are bidding on.

The guillotine FAAB calculator weighs this the same way. It simulates the rest of your season, works out your odds of being chopped this week with the player and without him, and prices the claim higher when the week itself is the thing at risk.

A worked example, with made-up numbers

Every figure in this example is invented. It is here to show the order the questions come in, not to tell you what a running back costs.

Notice which step did the work. Being third from bottom is what turned an ordinary upgrade into a bid worth 40 percent of a remaining budget, and a safe team looking at the identical player should have bid half as much and been pleased to lose him.

Four Tuesdays, four calls

Every rule in this lesson comes down to one decision you make on a Tuesday. Here are four of them.

Lesson 7 of 7

The endgame: money left against players left

By the last few weeks the format has turned into a small, rich auction. Six or seven teams remain, each one a survivor, and the two numbers that decide the title are how much of your budget is left and whether anybody worth buying is still being released.

Find your release cutoff before you plan

Several formats stop feeding the wire before the season ends. The FFPC Chop Classic locks chopped players from week 15, and Fantasy Life guillotine leagues stopped releasing them after week 14 in 2024. The NFFC Eliminator switches format entirely for the last four weeks, with the surviving four teams playing a total-points final. That cutoff is a deadline on your money. If nothing is released after week 14, every dollar you are holding in week 15 has already turned into nothing, and holding it was the mistake, not the caution.

What to do with what you have

These thresholds are rules of thumb I use, not measurements, and they assume the usual $1,000 budget:

• Two thirds or more left. You are the richest team in a shrinking market, and the market is about to hand you an elite player. Be the top bid on him. Being outbid here by a team with a quarter of your budget is the worst outcome available to you.
• A third to two thirds. You cannot win every auction, so stop entering all of them. Pick the one lineup slot that is genuinely costing you points, buy the best player available for it, and let the rest go.
• Under a third. You are streaming now. Fill your weakest slot on matchup, bid at or just above the minimum, and accept that your roster is what it is. Winning from here means the draft carried you.

The comfort is that prices fall with the field. Fewer teams left means fewer bidders on the same player, and several of the teams still alive spent their budgets in September working that out. A player who cost $400 in week 5 can go for a quarter of that in week 13, and the discipline that got you there is what buys him.

One more thing about the final week. In most formats the last two or four teams settle it on score, so the endgame is the one moment in a chopped league where ceiling beats floor. When you need to outscore one specific team rather than avoid being last, the boom-or-bust player you correctly avoided all season is suddenly the right start.

Been there

Mistakes that get you chopped

• Spending half the budget in week 1. Full wallets and one game of evidence make the first waiver run the worst market of the year, and there are another sixteen weeks of rosters coming.
• Drafting a bye cluster. Three starters off in the same week is a scheduled low score. It is the easiest elimination in the format to avoid and the one I still see every season.
• Paying a starter's price for a patch. A player you need for two weeks is worth two weeks. The bid should reflect how many Sundays he is actually in your lineup, not how good he looked on Sunday.
• Not reading the tiebreaks. On Sleeper a tie for the lowest score goes against the team with fewer season points, and in week 1 against the better draft slot. The FFPC settles a tied bid on worst total points, then worst previous week. Both of those change a decision you will actually face.
• Managing to your average. There are no standings here and nobody hands out a prize for points scored. A season of 120-point weeks and one 60 is a loss, and a season of 95s is a win.
• Going out with money in the bank. Leftover FAAB in a format with no next season is the clearest waste in fantasy football. If you are still holding half your budget in November, you have been playing not to lose in a game where everybody else already lost.

Before you bid

The Tuesday checklist

A chopped league gives you one decision a week and no way to take it back. This is the list I run before I put a claim in, and the first three items are about my own lineup rather than about the player, on purpose.

FAQ

Questions, answered

Next

Run it on your own league

When a roster is chopped and you have to put a number on somebody, the guillotine FAAB calculator prices the claim against your actual lineup and what your rivals have left to spend, and gives you a walk-away line. The FAAB strategy guide is the season-long reasoning behind it, and most of it carries over. Bid on the weeks a player actually starts for you, and never win an auction you should have lost.

If your chopped league is on Sleeper, sync it in League Pulse and you can see every surviving roster alongside what the field around you has been spending. And if a term on this page was new, guillotine league and the rest of the vocabulary are in the glossary.