The draft is the fun part. It is not where you win your guillotine league. Dex and Chiz sit down this week to break down free agent acquisition budget (FAAB) strategy — the single biggest lever separating teams that survive deep into the season from teams that get chopped early. Their case: the draft gives you a roster, but FAAB is what rebuilds it, week after week, as the league thins out around you.
The setup is simple. After Week 1, whoever finishes last is eliminated — all 14 of their players hit the waiver wire at once, and every remaining team is sitting on $1,000 in FAAB to bid with. That means a first-round pick can be sitting there, unclaimed, for the taking. It's tempting. It's also usually a mistake.
Rule 1: Show Restraint — Don't Panic and Spend Early
"Don't panic and spend too much FAAB early," Dex says, and it's the strategy everything else builds on. If your roster was good enough to survive Week 1, it's almost always good enough for Week 2 — the juicy names hitting the wire after the first cut look tempting, but chasing them burns dollars you'll need later.
There are exactly three situations worth breaking that discipline for:
An injury to a starter. If your top pick goes down and your bench can't cover the gap, that's the moment to spend — not to panic, but to fill a real hole.
A critical bye week stacked with an injury. Early byes (Week 5 is just Kansas City and Carolina this year) aren't a reason to spend on their own — nearly every team has one. It's only worth bidding when a bye collides with an injury and leaves you genuinely short at a position.
Post-bye players. When a team with a player who's already had their bye week gets eliminated, that player becomes the most valuable kind of free agent on the board — no more bye-week risk for the rest of the season. "The most valuable free agent you can pick up are post-bye players," Dex says.
Outside of those three, the advice is the same: hold your water. As Chiz puts it, "everybody else has a thousand dollars to spend too" — and the team that blows $500 on a Week 1 name to feel unstoppable is often the same team that can't afford to fix a real problem in Week 6.
Rule 2: You Get Multiple Bites at the Apple
Here's the part that makes patience easier: the big names you miss out on in Week 1 almost always come back around. Dex points out that a star player is typically bid on three or four separate times over a season — a different team gets cut nearly every week, and if that team happened to be carrying last year's Ja'Marr Chase or Josh Allen, they're right back on the wire. Each time, the price drops.
"You can't see it as, this is my one chance to get Josh Allen," Chiz says. "Because more than likely it is not your one chance."
Rule 3: Play the 50-Meter Target, Not the Playoffs
The biggest mental shift for anyone coming from a traditional league: stop looking at the playoff schedule. In guillotine, Dex says, "you look at the target in front of you" — the very next week — because your roster in December will barely resemble the one you drafted in August. By the time a season plays out, most rosters have turned over almost entirely outside of a first pick or two.
That turnover is exactly why patience pays off late. Elite players who hit a bad week or an inconvenient bye in November go for a fraction of their August price. "Bijan Robinson's gonna be on sale, baby," Chiz says — and Dex backs it up: survive the late-season dip on a stud like CD Lamb or Jamarr Chase, and you can often land him for under $100.
The Cautionary Tale: Don't Be the Guy Who Panic-Bids Puka Nacua
Chiz lays out the scenario that plays out in almost every league, every year: a mid-pack team sees a top-tier name — Puka Nacua, say — hit the wire in Week 1 and decides this is the move that makes them unstoppable. They drop $500 to win the bid. Now they've got $500 left for the rest of the season, and no room to maneuver when an injury actually forces their hand.
"He thinks he's great," Chiz says. "But the reality is injuries are gonna happen. The reality is everybody else is holding their water... and they're gonna outbid you for somebody when you need them."
The exception: if spending is the only way to avoid getting cut yourself, spend it. FAAB dollars don't roll over and there's no bonus for finishing with money in the bank. Survival always comes first — just go in knowing what it costs you down the road.
The Essential Takeaway
Spend zero or spend low for as long as you can. Break that rule only for an injury, an injury stacked with a critical bye, or a post-bye player who fills a real need. Everything else can wait — because it will come back around, cheaper, in a few weeks.
This is exactly the kind of week-to-week decision Shrewdness Pro is built for: weekly rankings that account for matchups, byes, and injuries, plus our best bets against the spread. It's $25 for the season, or $8 a month if you just want to test it out.
And if you haven't already, check out our free preseason rankings at theshrewdness.beam.ly — built specifically for guillotine, not standard season-long leagues, so the names that matter (and the ones that quietly drop) are already accounted for.
Stay shrewd, everybody.