Duels & Your Board
A duel shows you two players and asks one question. Answer it, and your personal rankings update instantly. That's the whole loop: no spreadsheets, no typing out lists — your board builds itself from your decisions, and you can play as many duels as you want, free, with or without an account.
There are two kinds of duels, matching the two games:
- Draft duels (preseason): "Who would you rather have this season?" Cross-position — an RB against a WR is a real draft decision. These build your season-long draft board.
- Weekly duels (in season): "Who scores more this week?" Always within one position — you pick the position, then duel RB vs RB, WR vs WR, and so on. These build your weekly rankings, fresh each week.
You start from consensus, not from zero
Nobody ranks 174 players from scratch. Your draft board starts as a market consensus board (player values via FantasyCalc), and your weekly rankings start from that week's projection-based consensus, seeded fresh every Tuesday. From there, every duel you answer bends the board toward your opinions. Don't touch a position and you simply hold the consensus view of it — which also means you're never penalized for what you didn't get to; you're graded as if you'd agreed with the market.
How one pick moves the board
Under the hood each player on your board carries a rating, and a duel is a head-to-head between ratings (the same family of math chess uses). Two things follow from that, and they're worth knowing:
- Expected picks barely move anything. Take the consensus favorite over a player ranked far below him and your board shifts a hair — you agreed with your own board.
- Upsets move a lot. Take the underdog and he jumps meaningfully, and the math scales with how big the upset was. Strong opinions register fast.
A duel is never graded right or wrong — see how scoring works. It's purely the mechanism that shapes your list.
Matchups are kept competitive on purpose: your second player is usually ranked near the first, because "WR4 or WR7?" teaches the board something and "WR1 or WR70?" doesn't.
The pool deepens as you go
In draft mode, your early duels draw from the top of the board, and the pool widens as you play:
| Draft duels played | Pool |
|---|---|
| Under 50 | Top 20 players |
| 50–99 | Top 50 |
| 100–199 | Top 100 |
| 200+ | The full board |
You sort out the first round before you're asked about the twelfth. (Boosted movers are the exception — they can surface from anywhere, see below.)
Mover boosts: when the market moves, you get asked
When the market meaningfully moves on a player — his consensus value shifts by 20% or more (in season, the move must also be worth at least 2 projected points) — he gets a boost: roughly 3× more likely to show up in your next duels until you've had a chance to re-rank him.
| Size of the move | Boosted appearances |
|---|---|
| 20–40% | 3 duels |
| 40–80% | 5 duels |
| Over 80% | 8 duels |
Boosted matchups are also aimed at where the market now thinks he belongs, not where your stale rank has him — so a few picks are enough to move him to his new tier (or deliberately hold him where you had him; fading the move is a take too).
Editing by hand
Duels are the fast path, not the only path. On your board you can always:
- Drag any player to exactly the slot you want (until he's locked).
- Add a player in draft mode — see the swap rules below.
- Tap any player for his recent takes, stats, and matchup before deciding.
- Skip any duel you don't have an opinion on.
Draft mode: add/drop is a swap
Want a deep sleeper who isn't on your 174? Adding him swaps out the current bottom player at that position — the board never grows. The dropped player can still count against you at season's end if he goes on to matter (he stays in the scoring universe), which is exactly the trade-off you're accepting. Candidates come from the ranked tail of the market feed, which deepens as the season approaches. Add/drop closes when your board snapshots (five days before Week 1).
Your contest board is snapshotted five days before Week 1 kickoff (Saturday, September 5 for 2026) and graded all season. Draft duels and board editing stay open through the final draft weekend — the live board keeps moving for your real-life drafts while the snapshotted copy competes. At Week 1 kickoff, draft mode retires and your draft board becomes view-only.
Weekly mode: locks and player removals
Two things manage your weekly board for you once games start:
Kickoff locks. Each NFL player freezes at his own kickoff — no dueling him, no moving him, and he's graded at the rank he held when his game started. The rest of your board stays live until each player's own game begins. There's no early-week full-board freeze; a Thursday game only locks the players in it. When every player at a position has kicked off, that position is closed for the week.
Out-player replacement. If a player is officially ruled out (Out, IR, Suspended, PUP), he's removed from that week's player pool on every board that has him — even after his game started, as long as he never played — and replaced by the highest-projected player not already on your board. The replacement enters at the lower of his projection slot or the removed player's slot, never higher than either. Players already on your board are never auto-moved; re-ranking around the news is your job (and big movers will start showing up in your duels so you can act fast). Late replacements only draw from players who haven't kicked off yet.
Two statuses that do not trigger removal: Questionable and Doubtful. Those players just get a status badge — playing them or fading them is your call.
Every removal and replacement is logged in This Week's Changes on your rankings page, so nothing happens silently. And if a player never plays in his game at all, he's excluded from scoring on every board — details in how scoring works.
Guests and accounts
You can duel without an account — progress is saved to your device, with no cap on duels. Creating a free account keeps your board everywhere, lets you claim a username, puts you on the leaderboard, and unlocks the draft kit (exports, imports, your public board page, and live Sleeper draft sync). Upgrading from guest to account keeps everything you've built.
One thing to know: importing a CSV replaces your draft board and resets your draft duel history (locked snapshots are never touched). Import first, duel second.