Guillotine league strategy
One team dies every week and their whole roster hits the pool, so the standard waiver math is wrong in both directions — too generous on scraps, too timid when you're on the block. This prices a bid against the eliminations you still have to survive. For a normal league, use the standard FAAB calculator instead.
The formula
bid = (budget ÷ eliminations left) × tier × survival, shown as a ±20% range. Dividing by eliminations rather than by weeks is the whole trick: at 18 teams your allowance is $59 a week, and at the final two it is your entire remaining budget, which is correct — there is no next week to save for.
Tier — multiples of one week's allowance
Survival — where you project this week
The survival multiplier is the part people argue with, so here is the reasoning out loud: unspent budget has no salvage value. A manager projected in the bottom two who bids $235 on an elite add and loses the tiebreak is out, and the $765 they protected buys nothing. Same player, same budget, projected safe versus projected out, the model moves from $188–$282 to $471–$706.
What it deliberately ignores: your league's bidding culture (some rooms chronically overbid — add 20% in those), roster-slot pressure when you have no open spot and would be cutting a starter to make room, and the endgame case where two managers are both above the cut and bidding purely to deny each other. That last one is a psychology call, not math.
How guillotine fantasy football works
No matchups, no bracket, no trades in most rooms. Every team sets a lineup, the lowest total score that week is eliminated, and that manager's entire roster is dropped into free agency for everyone else to bid on. The common setup is 18 teams and a $1,000 FAAB budget, so you are surviving 17 eliminations to win.
The consequence that changes everything: you are never playing an opponent, you are playing the floor. A 190-point week that would beat most head-to-head opponents is worthless if it is the lowest score on the board, and a 95-point week is completely survivable if four other managers had byes and injuries. Weekly floor beats weekly ceiling in this format, which is the opposite of what tournament advice will tell you.
What the format punishes
Spending like the pool is scarce
In a normal league the waiver wire is scraps by October, which is why standard FAAB advice says pay up. Here a full starting roster is released every week. The tier multipliers above are stingy at the bottom on purpose — a 0.25× flier is a dollar bid, not a double-digit one.
Hoarding while projected out
The mirror mistake, and the more expensive one. Budget discipline is a virtue right up until the week it kills you, and the format gives no partial credit for finishing with money.
Drafting for upside
Boom-bust rosters get guillotined in the first month. The bust weeks arrive before the boom weeks can average out, and there is no averaging out — one bad Sunday ends the season. Draft the floor and buy the upside later, when eliminated rosters make it cheap.
Where the player values come from
The tier lookup reads the same redraft trade value the rest of the site runs on — built from live draft ADP and a published curve, not a hand-tuned ranking. Every anchor point is on the methodology page. To see who is actually being added right now, the trending pickups page tracks adds across real leagues in the last 24 hours.
Questions people ask
- What is a guillotine league?
- A fantasy format where the lowest-scoring team each week is eliminated and their entire roster is released into free agency. There are no head-to-head matchups and no playoff bracket — you are playing against the league median every single week, and the last manager standing wins.
- How much FAAB should I bid in a guillotine league?
- Pace it against the eliminations you still have to survive, not the calendar. With $1000 and 18 teams alive, one week's allowance is about $59, and a genuinely elite free agent is worth roughly 4 weeks of it — about $235 — while a replacement-level flier is worth well under one.
- Should I spend big in week 1?
- Rarely. A full roster hits the pool every week, so the player you overpaid for in week 1 has a comparable replacement available in week 3 for a fraction of the price. The exception is the only one that matters: if you project in the bottom two, budget you do not spend is budget you never get to spend.
- Do trade values even apply in a guillotine league?
- The rankings do; the prices do not. This tool reads a player’s redraft trade value to decide which tier he sits in, then prices him against your survival horizon rather than against a normal league’s waiver scarcity — because guillotine replacement level is far higher than a standard league’s.
- How many teams and how much budget is standard?
- The common setup is 18 teams and a $1,000 season budget, which means 17 eliminations to survive. The calculator takes whatever numbers your league actually uses.