Guillotine leagues (also called Chopped leagues) work on one simple, brutal rule: every week, the team with the lowest score is eliminated. There are no head-to-head matchups and no season-long record to fall back on. You are playing against the entire league at once, and the only thing that matters is not finishing last. Survive enough weeks and the players from eliminated teams flood back into the free-agent pool, so the waiver wire matters far more than it does in a standard league.
So what is a guillotine league? It's that all-play, lowest-score-out format, and the rules reward a specific kind of guillotine league strategy. Instead of asking "who scores the most points," a good manager asks "what is the chance my team finishes dead last this week," and "which move lowers that chance the most."
RotoWire is developing three tools to answer exactly those questions and we are excited to give you a sneak peek this week.
Most Chopped Players in 2026
- Week 3 Most Chopped Players: Justin Jefferson, Tetairoa McMillan, De'Von Achane
- Week 2 Most Chopped Players: Saquon Barkley, Malik Nabers, Bijan Robinson
- Week 1 Most Chopped Players: Omarion Hampton, Ja'Marr Chase, George Pickens
How it works: We replay the guillotine rule across every synced Sleeper league: each completed week, the lowest-scoring surviving team is chopped, and the players on that roster are recorded. Aggregated across leagues, it surfaces the players most often stuck on eliminated teams this season.
Most chops ranks by the raw number of leagues where a player's team got guillotined. Chop rate = chops ÷ leagues that roster the player, which flags players who sink teams regardless of how widely they're owned (minimum ownership applies to reduce noise).
Before you start: how the numbers work
All three tools share the same foundation, so it is worth understanding a few terms once.
Guillotine Chop Odds (or "elimination odds") is the probability that your team posts the lowest score in the league in a given week — in other words, the chance you get chopped. A team with 6% chop odds is fairly safe; a team at 30% is in real danger. Every tool here is ultimately built around raising or lowering this one number.
Where the projections come from. Player projections are RotoWire's own, scored under your league's exact settings (PPR, Half-PPR, or Standard). The tools are "floor-weighted," which means they pay extra attention to a player's downside. In a Guillotine league a safe 12-point floor is often more valuable than a boom-or-bust player who could score 25 or could score 4, because one bad week ends your season.
How elimination odds are calculated. Rather than simply adding up projected points, the tools run thousands of simulated versions of the week for every team in your league at once, letting each player land anywhere across their realistic range of outcomes. Counting how often your team comes out lowest gives your chop odds. Because every team is simulated against the same set of outcomes, the tools can isolate exactly how much a single lineup change or waiver pickup moves your odds.
Live betting markets (optional). You can blend in live betting lines — team point totals and player props — from a sportsbook or prediction market of your choice. When enabled, these nudge the projections toward what the market expects. This is covered in more detail near the end of the guide.
Guillotine Survival Odds
WHAT IT IS
The Survival Odds tool loads your entire Sleeper league and shows every team's chance of being eliminated this week, ranked from safest to most in danger. It is your league-wide dashboard: one glance tells you where you stand and which of your rivals are on the brink.
HOW TO USE IT
- Enter your Sleeper League ID in the box and click Analyze. (If you don't know your ID, see "Finding your Sleeper League ID" below.) You can also switch to the "Manually enter my team" tab if you'd rather type in a roster.
- Read the standings. Each team shows its weekly chop odds. The higher the percentage, the more likely that team is to be eliminated this week.
- Tap any team to expand its optimal lineup — the highest-projected legal starting lineup from that roster — along with each starter's projection, floor, and ceiling.
- Tap any player to open a detail card with the full picture: projection and risk, the projected stat line for the week, the current betting-market signal, and season-to-date advanced and trend metrics.
- Optionally, blend betting markets. Check "Blend betting markets" and choose an odds source to fold live lines into the projections.
WHY USE IT
It answers the two questions that decide a Guillotine week: am I safe, and is anyone clearly safer or more exposed than they look. Seeing a rival sitting at high chop odds tells you a strong week likely knocks them out; seeing yourself there tells you it is time to make a move. Because the tool builds each team's optimal lineup for you, it also shows whether an opponent is beatable this week or simply has too much firepower to catch.
Elimination Danger Rankings
WHAT IT IS
The Danger Rankings tool ranks individual players by how much they change a typical team's weekly elimination odds when you start them — the players most likely, and least likely, to get you chopped. It reframes a normal fantasy football rankings around survival instead of raw points.
HOW TO USE IT
- Choose your scoring (PPR, Half-PPR, or Standard) so the numbers match your league.
- Optionally choose an odds source and leave "Blend betting markets" on to factor in live lines.
- Click Rank players. The tool lists players ordered by their effect on weekly elimination risk.
- Tap any player to expand the detail: projection and risk (median projection, floor and ceiling, bust risk, and chop impact), the projected stat line, the market signal, and advanced and trend metrics.
WHY USE IT
A standard ranking tells you who might score the most. In a Guillotine league that is the wrong question when you are trying to avoid last place. A high-ceiling player who could also post a dud can quietly raise your elimination odds, while a steady floor play lowers them. Guillotine Rankings surface that difference directly, so you can set a lineup built to survive and spot which start-or-sit calls actually matter this week.
Waiver-Wire FAAB ROI: How much should you bid
WHAT IT IS
The Waiver-Wire FAAB ROI tool looks at the free agents available in your league and tells you which ones actually lower your team's weekly elimination odds, what each is worth, and the return you get for every FAAB dollar you spend. (FAAB — Free Agent Acquisition Budget — is the blind-bidding money most Sleeper leagues use for waivers.) The tool answers the question, "how much should I bid on X player?"
HOW TO USE IT
- Enter your Sleeper League ID and click Find pickups.
- Select your team from the dropdown. The tool shows your baseline weekly chop odds so you can see where you're starting from.
- Review the ranked free agents. Each row shows the player's projection, the drop in your chop odds if you add them ("Δ Chop"), an estimated going-rate bid, the maximum you should bid, and the return per FAAB dollar.
- Filter by position to focus on the spot you're trying to upgrade.
- Tap any player to see the details: which bench player you'd drop to make room, which of your starters the pickup would replace in your lineup, the market signal, and the player's advanced metrics.
HOW TO READ THE KEY COLUMNS
- Δ Chop — how much the pickup lowers your weekly elimination odds. This is the whole point: a bigger drop is a bigger improvement to your survival.
- Est. bid — a league-generic going rate for the player, expressed as a share of your FAAB budget. Think of it as roughly what the player will cost.
- Your max — the most you should pay given how much the pickup actually helps your specific team. Never bid more than the upgrade is worth to you.
- ROI / FAAB $ — the elimination-odds reduction you get per dollar. A high-ROI pickup fixes your weakness cheaply, and the list is ranked by this by default.
- Drop — the bench player you'd cut to make room, chosen as your most expendable option at the pickup's position. The starter the pickup out-projects stays on your bench as insurance.
WHY USE IT
FAAB is a limited budget, and in a Guillotine league the waiver wire is where seasons are won and lost — especially after eliminated teams' players return to the pool. It is easy to overpay for a big name who doesn't actually improve your starting lineup, or to miss a cheap pickup that meaningfully lowers your risk. This tool ties every bid back to the only thing that matters — your chance of survival — so you spend on the moves that help and skip the ones that don't.
On ESPN, Yahoo, or another platform?
The Survival Odds tool reads a full league directly from Sleeper. If your guillotine league runs on ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, or NFL.com instead, use the "Manually enter my team" tab and paste your roster — the tool matches your players and runs the same chop-odds math on your team. So you can get guillotine-league survival odds, danger rankings, and FAAB guidance whether you're in a Sleeper, Yahoo, or ESPN guillotine league.
Finding your Sleeper League ID
Two of the tools ask for your Sleeper League ID. It is easiest to find on a computer:
- Open your league on the Sleeper website (sleeper.com) and go to your league page.
- Look at the address bar. The URL looks like sleeper.com/leagues/1234567890123456789/team.
- The long string of numbers is your League ID. Copy it and paste it into the tool.
The ID is a public identifier for the league — it is not a password and doesn't give anyone access to your account.
Betting markets and odds sources
Each tool has a "Blend betting markets" option and a menu of odds sources. When you turn this on, the tools fold live market data — team point totals and player props — into the RotoWire projections, so the numbers reflect the latest information the market has priced in.
You can choose from several sources:
- Consensus — a blended median across several major sportsbooks. A good default when you want a balanced market view rather than one book's number.
- Individual sportsbooks — DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, and theScore. Pick the book you actually play at so the lines match what you'd see there.
- Prediction markets — Polymarket, Kalshi, and Novig. These provide game-level lines (like team totals) and player props. If contracts aren't available, players fall back to RotoWire projections nudged by the game environment.
In the detail cards, the individual market lines are clickable — tapping a line opens that exact market at the sportsbook or prediction market you selected, so you can check the current price or place a bet in one step.
A simple weekly workflow
If you want a routine, here is a straightforward way to use the three tools together each week:
- Start with Survival Odds to see where your team stands and how much danger you're in this week.
- Use the Danger Rankings to finalize your start-or-sit decisions, favoring the players who lower your elimination risk.
- Check the Waiver-Wire FAAB ROI tool before waivers run to find the pickups that improve your odds the most, and decide how much to bid.
- Re-run as things change. Projections and betting lines update through the week — injuries, news, and inactives all move the numbers — so it's worth a final look before lineups lock.
How to read the numbers
These tools are decision aids, not guarantees. They are built on projections and probabilities, and fantasy football is unpredictable by nature — that's the whole reason the elimination odds are expressed as percentages rather than certainties. A team at 8% chop odds will occasionally still be eliminated; a strong pickup can still have a quiet week. What the tools do reliably is point you toward the choices that improve your chances over the long run, which is exactly how you want to be making decisions in a format where one last-place finish ends your season.
Used together, they turn a hard question — "how do I avoid finishing last this week?" — into a clear one: see your risk, set the lineup that lowers it, and spend your waiver budget where it helps most.
