Guillotine Leagues™ Playoff Strategy Guide For 2026 Guilloteenies

Happy Postseason, Guillotine Leaguers! We’ve all had a full week to relish in our regular season Guillotine Leagues™ championships, collecting first-place payouts and trash-talking your leaguemates. Now, we look ahead to postseason Guillotine League action and further domination over our friends, family members, coworkers and colleagues.

At Fantasy Life and guillotineleagues.com, we’ll be offering our beloved Guilloteenie format! This is your standard Guillotine fun: each week’s lowest-scoring team is chopped until only one remains. Once a team is chopped, their entire roster goes to the waiver wire, at which point the survivors use their Free Agent Acquisition Budget (FAAB) to acquire studs and superstars alike. We call it a Guilloteenie because it’s only four weeks, for each week of the postseason. Isn’t that adorable? You’ll start with five teams in our standard format, or nine teams in our Double Chop format, in which two teams are chopped each week.

In this column, I’ll be providing general strategy as we prepare for our Playoff Guilloteenie drafts. I’ll also provide an example draft based on my own Playoff Guilloteenie rankings, which can give you an idea of different team-building outcomes. Also, be sure to check out the latest Chop Podcast, during which Brian Johnson & Matthew Freedman provide an excellent breakdown of the format & its strategies.

General Guillotine Leagues™ Strategy

If you’ve never played in a Guillotine League, first of all, how dare you? I’m kidding, welcome! Second, I’d recommend checking out Fantasy Life’s preseason FAQs and related articles, all of which can be found here. I’ll hit the highlights and keep it brief here:

• Lineups consist of 1 QB; 2 RB; 2 WR; 1 TE; and 2 FLEX
• The lowest-scoring team gets chopped each week, so you want to fill your roster with reliable players that are guaranteed utilization as part of their team’s offensive gameplan each week.
• As such, the goal is to simply not finish last. You don’t have to shoot for the stars, just stay out of the basement.
• The team you draft will not be the team with which you finish. There are more roster flexibility and improvement options in this format than in any other.

Playoff Guilloteenie Strategy

The first key thing to note about the Playoff Guilloteenie format is that there are no reserves. You’ll only draft a starting lineup of eight players as outlined above. For our regular-season winners, it’s possible that you won by hoarding all of the best players, even if that meant leaving them on your bench. That strategy won’t fly here, so don’t try any Bully Tight End or other similar strategies.

As such, only 40 players will be drafted in a standard five-team league. Unlike a standard regular-season Guillotine League, you won’t need to start Elic Ayomanor for the first six weeks of the season. You’re going to have good players on good teams throughout your roster.

Some readers may be familiar with other playoff fantasy formats, such as playoff best ball. The Playoff Guilloteenie requires the exact opposite mindset. For starters, you don’t need to worry about optimizing your roster with players that have the best chance to make the Super Bowl. Each week you survive, you will have an opportunity to improve your roster, scooping up the best players from the roster that just got cut and that will be playing the following week. However, this doesn’t mean you can turn two blind eyes to future matchups and the potential for players to advance; just one. I wouldn’t recommend filling your roster with a bunch of Panthers players. If you were planning on doing this, I think we’d better find you a new hobby.

If you read any of our in-season strategy columns or listened to the CHOP Podcast, you know that we at Fantasy Life are allergic to bye weeks. Taking an automatic zero in your lineup is as surefire a way to get chopped as any. Of course, in the playoffs, two teams will be on bye during Wild Card weekend: the Seahawks and Broncos. The primary advantage to drafting these players is that you won’t need to spend FAAB to acquire them for the Divisional Round and onward. However, I don’t believe that advantage is worth the guaranteed zero for any fantasy-relevant players on any of those two teams, save for one exception: Jaxon Smith-Njigba.

For position-specific advice, the only positional advantages to be found are at the quarterback and tight end positions. Remember, there are only five teams in a standard Playoff Guilloteenie, so only five quarterbacks and five tight ends need to be drafted. Over the 2026 season, Josh Allen scored over 40 more points than the next Playoff Guilloteenie quarterback, Drake Maye. Allen is the only quarterback who offers both the passing and rushing upside that makes him worth a high pick. If you don’t draft Allen, I’d recommend punting the position to the later rounds. This same mindset applies to George Kittle and the rest of the tight end position. Either spend that high pick on Kittle, or punt to the late rounds. If you’re playing in a Double Chop league, you can draft the next tier of quarterbacks and tight ends a little earlier.

Five-Team Playoff Guilloteenie Mock Draft

Round 1
 

1. Team 1: LAR WR Puka Nacua
2. Team 2: SF RB Christian McCaffrey
3. Team 3: SF TE George Kittle
4. Team 4: BUF RB James Cook
5. Team 5: JAC RB Travis Etienne
    

George Kittle’s positional advantage is so massive that it makes him worth the third overall pick. The only other game breakers available during Wild Card weekend are Nacua and McCaffrey.

Round 2
 

1. Team 5: BUF QB Josh Allen
2. Team 4: SEA WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba
3. Team 3: LAR RB Kyren Williams
4. Team 2: HOU WR Nico Collins
5. Team 1: PHI RB Saquon Barkley
    

While I would not take Josh Allen or Jaxon Smith-Njigba in the first round, I do think both of them are worth an aggressive pick in the second round. We covered Allen’s positional advantage above, and JSN offers you WR1 overall upside if you can make it to the Divisional Round.

Round 3
 

1. Team 1: CHI RB D’Andre Swift
2. Team 2: LAR WR Davante Adams
3. Team 3: PHI WR A.J. Brown
4. Team 4: NE WR Stefon Diggs
5. Team 5: CAR WR Tetairoa McMillan
    

Round 4
 

1. Team 5: DEN RB RJ Harvey
2. Team 4: PHI QB Jalen Hurts
3. Team 3: PIT RB Kenneth Gainwell
4. Team 2: NE QB Drake Maye
5. Team 1: DEN WR Courtland Sutton
    

Our first two Broncos come off the board here. With their first-round bye, these two are the only Broncos worth drafting in a standard five-team Guilloteenie.

Round 5
 

1. Team 1: PIT RB Jaylen Warren
2. Team 2: NE RB TreVeyon Henderson
3. Team 3: JAC QB Trevor Lawrence
4. Team 4: NE RB Rhamondre Stevenson
5. Team 5: PHI WR DeVonta Smith
    

Round 6
 

1. Team 5: CHI TE Colston Loveland
2. Team 4: PIT WR DK Metcalf
3. Team 3: LAC WR Ladd McConkey
4. Team 2: SEA RB Kenneth Walker
5. Team 1: NE TE Hunter Henry
    

Round 7
 

1. Team 1: SF WR Jauan Jennings
2. Team 2: PHI TE Dallas Goedert
3. Team 3: SEA RB Zach Charbonnet
4. Team 4: LAC WR Quentin Johnston
5. Team 5: CHI WR Luther Burden
    

Round 8
 

1. Team 5: JAC WR Parker Washington
2. Team 4: HOU TE Dalton Schultz
3. Team 3: JAC WR Jakobi Meyers
4. Team 2: CHI WR DJ Moore
5. Team 1: LAR QB Matthew Stafford
    

Final Results
 

Team 1 put off QB and TE until late and was able to stack their roster with solid RBs and WRs. Teams 2 and 4 ended up with well-rounded rosters. Team 3 snagged Kittle early, and Team 5 got Allen early. Those teams are not as strong at RB and WR.

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