Talk Fantasy Football

Hi there,

I want to start a league between 5 persons. How should i be doing this?
And what is the difference between a tournament and a league and how can i put these two together in the league i want to start.
I was thinking:
Everyone plays each other twice. At the end the first two play for the final.

Any other ideas?

The biggest difference in a league, compared to a tournament, is you should be playing everyone atleast once in a league. You might not play everyone in a tournament. And league teams usually play in multiple seasons.

Now, as to your league. I recommend that you round robin the 5 teams twice. That will give each coach 8 games to develop their team. I would then have the top four teams play a elimination playoff. First vs fourth, second vs third. Winners play each other for the championship. In our league, we play for the chaos cup. Then you start your next season. Possibly with some house rule to retire players (we roll 2d6, minus the player level, if total is 1 or less, the player retires), reduce fan factor (roll a d6 for every ff over 9, if 1 to 3, you lose that ff), etc.

With 5 people I'd not bother with semi-finals. Just having the top 2 play off would be fine, otherwise playing round robin twice is a good idea.

Don't try to have a fixed schedule (i.e. player A plays B, then C then D then E) as you'll find someone can't make one session and everything gets messed up. Just let people play who ever is around until everyone has played everyone twice and then have the final.

I have to disagree with you on this one ian. The first two leagues I ran were this way, and what happened was the three really keen players had all their games played before the other two players even played their first couple of games.

In the latest league I ran, I scheduled it and had one game a week. We had 7 players, so one player per week had a week off. It worked out really good. We didn't have one players with 10 games going up against a team with 2 games.

Okay - the problem is that you need people to turn up regularly. Having a side competition so the really enthusiastic ones can play non-league games also helps (with different teams!).

Maybe with 5 fixed schedule would work okay, but if the league grows you either end up with long periods to play the game (so that people get bored waiting) or with lots of forfeits as RL intervenes.

Making a league fixed is also possible by setting time limits for matches to be played. With the size of your league 1 week should be enough, but to be safe you'd better make it two.

We have a league with 5 teams also and kind of go in between the 2 suggestions

We play round robin and let teams play who they like when they like EXCEPT that you can't play any second game with the same opponent till all first 'round robin' games have been played.

We give people 3 weeks to play their 4 'first' games and then any games that aren't played result in a tie, unless one player admits they were the one who couldn't make the fixture take place and then they forfit the match

This gives people freedom to get the games organised themselves around RL issues yet makes sure no team has ever played more than 3 games more than another (usually find difference is at most 1) and thus avoids the extreme cases of this kind of thing