If you’re in a roto or a points league that utilizes max games, you’re going to have to use certain strategies, especially if you’re used to head to head leagues. If you want to know the differences between roto and head to head, go to this link: rotisserie versus head to head.

Some scenarios you’ll encounter over the course of the season, regarding max games:

Injuries

Injuries happen no matter what league you’re in, obviously. When you have max games though, if one or more of your top guys go down with an injury, it’s a big blow to your potential production. Max games requires quality of output in a rigid quantity. Everyone shares the same quantity, it’s the manager’s job to try to squeeze out the quality. Make sure you have some type of contingency plan but don’t panic, because unless it’s a long term injury to your best player(s), it’s not that bad.

Goalies

Most goalies won’t play anywhere near the maximum games limit. That means you’re going to want to have at least one extra than your starting slots require, if you want to be able to get to the limit, which isn’t a problem for forwards, usually the opposite, actually. Since goalies are rested several times a season, depending on the team, you’ll want to draft or acquire the best goalies you can because quality is the name of the game with max games. Spot starting your bench goalies in favorable matchups is key.

Benching Players

If you have 82 max games (per slot) as your set number, which is the most common, and you have multiple bench players, you’re going to have to purposely bench players on many occasions. If you’re swapping in bench players frequently as if it’s head to head with no max games, then you’re going to run out of games to use before the season is up. You may get that early lead but it’s shortsighted because you’ll run out of slots that actually add to your official production and you’ll see yourself slide down the standings. Think long term. Play the best players you have as often as you can. Spot start your bench players when they have good matchups. Injuries will cut into your need to bench so don’t worry about it too much.

Position Distribution

Due to the fact that you have max games, you’ll want quality over quantity. If your league has positional distinctions like in Yahoo! public leagues, you’ll want to spread the wealth across all your positions. That means you don’t want to end up with a bunch of great centers but have weak wingers and D. Max games will force you to lose a lot of production in the long run, because you’ll be forced to bench your good centers quite often and also only be able to get subpar production from your other positions if you neglected them. The draft is very important in this scenario. Trade to shore up your weaknesses.

Streaming

Max games is a deterrent for streaming. Everyone has the same amount of games to utilize so adding and dropping players over and over does nothing but hurt your quality of production. It’s a totally different game than H2H, so don’t worry about streamers in leagues where max games are used.

Maximum games played is pretty useful for a lot of things. It makes managers be aware of the schedule and matchups for their players. You need to have quality over quantity in terms of production. Also, it makes balanced rosters, both in terms of positions and also team and schedule variance. If you have a lot of players from the same team, you’re going to end up having schedule difficulties and ultimate sacrifice production in the long term because you’ll end up benching players sometimes.