Last Man Standing Rules
Everything you need to know before you make your first pick.
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1. How It Works
Each gameweek, you pick one team you think will win. If your team wins, you survive to the next gameweek. If your team draws or loses, you lose a life. Once you've lost all your lives, you're eliminated. The last player (or players) still standing wins the competition.
You can never pick the same team twice in the same competition, even after you've used all your lives from a previous elimination cycle — so choose carefully early on.
2. Pick Deadlines
Picks lock 30 minutes before the first kickoff of the gameweek — not before your own team's kickoff. Once the earliest fixture in a gameweek is 30 minutes away, every pick for that gameweek is final for every player, and you can no longer change or remove your selection.
The countdown shown on the competition page is the source of truth for how much time you have left.
3. Progressing & Losing Lives
Your competition is set up with a number of lives (chosen by the competition admin when it was created — commonly one, for a traditional "one mistake and you're out" format). You lose a life whenever your picked team fails to win outright. Reach zero lives and you're eliminated for good, unless the competition's end-game rule brings everyone back (see section 6).
Safety nets: some competitions let you activate a safety net on a pick. If that's turned on for your competition, a drawn match counts as a survival instead of a loss on any pick where you've activated it — but you only get a limited number of safety nets for the whole competition, set by the admin, so use them wisely.
4. Missed Picks & Auto-Pick
If you don't make a pick before the deadline, the system will automatically assign you a team once auto-pick has run for that gameweek — the first available team alphabetically that you haven't already used. An auto-assigned pick counts exactly the same as one you chose yourself: if that team doesn't win, you still lose a life.
Gameweeks aren't graded (and elimination isn't applied) until auto-pick has been run and every player has a pick one way or another — so a missed pick never gets silently skipped, but you also shouldn't rely on auto-pick as a strategy, since it always takes the alphabetically first team left, not the best one.
5. Postponed & Rescheduled Fixtures
Football schedules change. Here's exactly what happens to your pick when they do:
- Fixture postponed, kickoff still 24+ hours away: your pick on that fixture is removed and you're notified. You'll need to make a new pick from what's still available before the deadline.
- Fixture postponed, kickoff under 24 hours away: your pick is left exactly as it is. This stops a last-minute postponement from leaving you unable to make a new pick in time.
- Fixture rescheduled to a date after the following gameweek has already started: your pick is removed and you're notified, and that fixture is taken out of the pool entirely — no one can pick it for that gameweek, even players who haven't picked yet.
An affected match will show a "Postponed" or "Rescheduled" badge on the pick screen and can't be selected.
6. If Everyone Goes Out the Same Week
Occasionally every remaining player fails in the same gameweek. What happens next depends on a setting the competition admin chose when the competition was created:
- Reinstate remaining players only (default): everyone who was still alive going into that gameweek is brought back with the lives they had before it, and the competition continues. Anyone eliminated in an earlier gameweek stays out.
- Full restart: every player who ever joined is reactivated with a full set of lives and safety nets, and the competition effectively restarts. A running total tracks how many gameweeks each player has survived across every cycle, for the final leaderboard.
7. Winning
Once only one player remains alive, the competition is complete and that player is the winner. If the competition reaches its final gameweek with more than one player still standing, the competition admin's rules summary (shown on the competition page) will explain how a winner is decided.
8. Settings Your Competition Admin Controls
Every Last Man Standing competition is configured individually by whoever creates it. Before you join, check the competition's own rules summary and settings for:
- Number of starting lives
- Whether safety nets are enabled, and how many each player gets
- The end-game rule (reinstate remaining players, or full restart)
- Which gameweek the competition starts from
- Entry fee and prize pool (or whether it's free to play)
- Whether the competition is public or invite-only, and whether it needs a password
9. What a Competition Admin Can Do
The person who created your competition (its admin/owner) can:
- Rename the competition and toggle whether it's publicly listed
- Send email invites, and share the invite code or invite link
- Mark a player's entry as paid or unpaid, for their own bookkeeping
- Remove a player from the competition
- View the full pick history for every gameweek
- Delete the competition entirely — but only before its first gameweek has locked
10. What a Competition Admin Cannot Do
To keep every competition fair, a competition admin does not have the ability to:
- See what team another player has picked before that gameweek locks
- Change, remove, or place a pick on behalf of another player
- Manually adjust a player's lives, eliminate them, or reinstate them outside of normal grading
- Extend, shorten, or otherwise override the 30-minute pick deadline
- Remove themselves from their own competition, or delete it once it has started
Platform staff can intervene in exceptional cases — for example correcting a fixture data error — but this is a platform-level safeguard, not something available to competition admins themselves.
11. Notifications
You'll get a notification (bell icon, top right) whenever:
- The system auto-picks a team for you because you missed the deadline
- A pick of yours is removed because its fixture was postponed or rescheduled
12. Joining a Competition
You can join a competition using its invite code, invite link, or by finding it in the public listings — right up until the deadline for its first gameweek passes. Once that deadline has gone, the competition is closed to new entrants.
Rules apply to Last Man Standing competitions. See your competition's own settings page for its specific configuration.
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