So ... you don't necessarily HAVE to wait back, but with guys I'm not 100% sold on, I sit 'em the first game of the year to see how they do. Your whole team is pretty strong, so I'm not sure I'd bench anyone.

I play mostly roto and have a good track record in that format. Typically my rule of thumb for sit or start (and the very fact you're already thinking about this is a good sign...) is that if I'm confident a guy is a solid top 100 then I'm going to start him (or I guess, call that top 80 in a 10-team format, I'm used to 12-team). If he's a marginal guy then I may sit him as long as I'm not too far behind schedule, or obviously if he's an injury concern or in a particularly bad matchup (but I would never sit a top 60 or 70 player if he's healthy).

In my experience, you don't want to get very far behind at all because it can be hard to make back up, especially if you get injuries as the season goes on. And you don't want to end up streaming marginal players to catch up the games. Another route you could go (I've been able to pull this off a few times to varying degrees) is to play more or less all your players regardless, get ahead of schedule in the process, and then aggressively make 2for1 trades to concentrated your roster in fewer but better guys, who you will then be playing fewer games (because you have fewer of them) but with higher quality production. Bear in mind that managing to make 2for1 trades gets a lot harder as leagues get more competitive.

Usually though you will only have around 10 strong players that you want to play at any one time, and an 82 game limit per slot. On average a player plays somewhere around 76 games a season, so you're already needing to use your more marginal players (11 through 13) to fill in the gaps. So I do think it's a dangerous game to assume you can ever make up much ground later on, and I try to make sure I'm no more than 2-3 behind in any given slot and no more than 10 or so behind overall. I also make sure not to get too far ahead of schedule, because you want wiggle room to adjust your strategy later in the season, to chase people down in particular categories.

Hope this helps slightly in your planning - it's quite a complex when you really get into it. Good luck!

Doing first roto leeg in a while and there is no game limit in the HB Fantrax leeg.

Never played this format in roto before.

Any suggestions on strategies w/out a games played max?

Thanks all for the thoughts, much appreciated!

Without a max games cap?

Didnt the HB leagues have a weekly lineup set? That will practically limit games played (as opposed to daily lineup changes with no cap.)

Cheg/Vegemite - exactly. With the weekly format, the games cap wouldn't have really been necessary unless some team wanted to just bail on all good players and stream buttheads all season. That probably wouldn't have worked out all that well.

Thanks Veg and Dan.

Having confirmed the rules (not actually in one of the HB leagues). I would say you just treat it like your bread and butter H2H.

Break it down i to 1 week "matchups" against yourself and try to maximise stats in that week. Just dont punt anything!

Back end of the season your H2H experience should help. Review your relative position within each stat and identify areas you can maximise value (ie. Sacrificing 1 point in boards to gain 3 in steals). Beware there is generally a % push after xmas in my experience.

Yeah Veg,

the H2H similarities immediately jumped off the page although the incessant streaming and soft-punting weeks makes it not as comparable as I first thought.

Thanks for the additional thoughts!

Smart stuff Veg - was gonna say the same about the similarities with h2h and using 1 or 2 streaming spots where marginal guys have 4 games etc. Agree ppl focus more on %s and getting fg% up 2nd half of season.