Weekly elimination changes every decision.
Model weekly survival risk, compare floor-aware rankings, and plan FAAB from your league context.
ESPN Knockout is weekly elimination — one wrong start ends your season. Fantasy Heartbeat organizes your roster around weekly survival risk: floor-aware rankings, player-specific FAAB decision support, and full-season chop scenarios. Risk and bid amounts are estimates, not guarantees of survival or a winning waiver claim.
How ESPN Knockout works
Every week, the manager with the lowest score is eliminated and their entire roster hits the waiver wire as free agents. Everyone still alive can bid for those players in a blind FAAB auction. Last manager standing wins the season.
That single mechanic rewrites the entire strategy. Ceiling chasing gets you eliminated early. Consistency — not upside — keeps you alive through the grind. And when a roster drops at the elimination wire, deciding which players fit your roster and how much budget to risk becomes a new weekly problem.
The guillotine community has been running this format for years under different names. Now that ESPN has launched Knockout on their platform, the player pool just got a lot bigger. r/guillotineleagues is the community home — thousands of managers who've been playing this format since before it had a brand.
Built for elimination. Ready for Knockout.
Floor-First Survival Rankings
Compare floor-focused signals alongside your league and roster context to surface fragile lineup spots before the weekly chop.
Win-Only FAAB Bidding
Our waiver tools help you compare pay-if-you-win bid scenarios and preserve budget context. Clearing-price validation is still open, so treat the amounts as decision support rather than a guaranteed price to win.
Season Survival Simulator
Run your roster through a full Knockout season. The chop simulator projects your elimination risk week-by-week and flags where the floor gaps are — so you can fix them on waivers before week one.
The guillotine format has a home: r/guillotineleagues — strategy threads, waiver wire debates, and managers who've been playing weekly-elimination long before ESPN called it Knockout.
The window is open. Get the edge now.
Most Knockout managers are flying blind in their first season. Connect your league and run the survival board before your first lineup lock.
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