Well another week is in the books, with this past week being the first of a few wacky fantasy weeks in terms of scheduling. American Thanksgiving meant there were no Thursday games and a full slate of Friday games, so it was an odd week to say the least. With the Olympics and an All-Star Game on the horizon in the new year, there will be a lot more scheduling oddities ahead! 

This week we received an email from a reader of the website who gave us a great suggestion. As a long time rotisserie keeper league player, the reader was curious to hear the pros and cons of head-to-head leagues, and how they work in contrast to roto leagues. While I usually break down information on players to watch for, I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to talk about different league formats and what is appealing for each of them. 

For the longest time, roto leagues were the main format for most fantasy sports leagues.  The traditional system of taking your essential statistical categories and ranking them all from best to worst and giving each team the corresponding total points based on your category rankings is probably still the most popular format to this day. Every owner is competing with everyone else at all times.

In roto leagues, the best team truly does win at the end of it all. Whoever can out-compete and outlast the rest of the field will stand alone atop the standings at the end of the season. It's a great format, and I personally enjoy how much you can pinpoint what areas your team are either strong or weak in. I also find that it can be the most unforgiving format as well. Most fantasy veterans will claim the roto takes the most skill to win a league championship in, and that may be true. 

Head-to-head (H2H for short) has a few different variations, but at its core there are two main differences. First and foremost, your performances go from a season-long marathon, to a week-to-week event. If your team is in a funk in roto, the season could be lost if you can't turn things around fast enough. In contrast, you can have a bad week in H2H, but in the long run the damage done is far less significant.  Things like injuries can be remedied much easier too. Say Sidney Crosby is out for a month. In roto, you are losing all of Sidney Crosby's production for a full month, and sure you can replace him with someone else, but odds are you aren't going to match the original player's production. In H2H, while losing Crosby still sucks, it is much easier to deal with that on a week-to-week basis because you can search for players with favorable schedules (no games played limit like in roto).

The second major difference between the two formats is that in H2H, you only are ever facing one other player per week. There's pros and cons to this one. You will have easier weeks and harder weeks since every week is a one-on-one matchup against one other owner in your league. This creates a lot of room for results being skewed one way or another. Sometimes you can have a dynamite week, but you run into the one guy in your league who had a better week than you, and you lose. On the contrary, sometimes you might have a subpar week, but if you are lucky to draw a weaker opponent, you may get some leeway.

In all serious fantasy leagues, the onus is on the owners to be diligent in keeping the rosters competitive and setting their lineups consistently, whether it be on a weekly or daily basis.  I find lazy owners can be extra detrimental to H2H leagues, especially in H2H category leagues. To elaborate, there are a few variations of H2H leagues. If you prefer to assign point values to stats, there are head-to-head points leagues. These are pretty straightforward because whoever has the most points at the end of the week gets a win. Alternatively, there are H2H category leagues, or "cats leagues". 

There are two variants of cats leagues. In both versions you compete with your opponent in every category throughout the week. For either win, lose or tie each category. So if there are 15 categories in your league, you could potentially go 15-0-0 in your match. Some leagues carry all your category wins over to your overall record, whereas other leagues just give you a straight up win, loss or tie for the overall match. So going back to my original point, in leagues that carry over each individual category into the overall standings, you could see how owners not setting their lineups could be problematic. If you were to go 12-3-1 one week because a guy didn't keep his lineups up-to-date, that has the potential to cause a major swing in the league standings.

One other big difference I notice between the two formats is how you use your goalies. In roto, while you may sometimes pick and choose your goalie's matchups from time to time, it's pretty straightforward. You plug your goalies in your lineup and let them accumulate their stats all season. In H2H, specifically in category leagues, I find goalie categories can be a real chess match at times. I'm in two leagues myself that track the following goalie stats: wins, losses, save percentage, goals against average, and shutouts. 

You'd be surprised how much strategy comes into play with the category system. Sometimes you may have wins and losses secured but you are trailing in the save percentage and GAA categories. Do you risk making another start on the week and potentially losing a game and giving up a category? There's a lot of risk reward at times, and it makes it pretty fun. Sometimes at the end of a week you could be tied 6-6-3 and going out and picking up a guy that can get you four or five faceoffs or three extra hits is the difference in winning or losing your week. The constant potential for close finishes week after week never gets old for me. 

One other extra wrinkle that H2H provides is the playoff format at the end of the season. This is kind of a double-edged sword in some ways. While I think it's a ton of fun to have a playoff bracket to crown a champion rather than just having the season end anti-climatically, the playoff format isn't a perfect solution either. First off, it sucks when you have a dominant year and then in one bad week it can all be for nothing. A lot of leagues I know have started awarding part of the prize pool to the top regular season teams for that very reason. There's definitely potential for a team that was clearly inferior during the regular season to get hot all of a sudden and fluke their way to a victory. 

One last point that I like to vouch for regarding H2H leagues is that they usually feel so much more personal. One of the leagues I am in is a H2H league with a few close friends of mine, mixed with some people I don't know quite as well. Every time I go head-to-head with one of my buds, it's a non-stop week of trash talking and needling each other. It never fails to create an extra layer of fun since you are trying to out-manage the other person. That's something you don't quite get in roto leagues as much. Additionally, in keeper H2H leagues I find after a while you kind of know what to expect from most owners. Heading into some weeks you might feel a sense of dread since you know you're up against a juggernaut of the league. The matchup system really adds a ton.

When it all comes down to it at the end of the day, it's really personal preference. Over the years I've become more of a H2H guy myself, but both formats have their pros and cons. I would definitely agree with the sentiment that a competitive roto league is much harder to win than a H2H league in the grand scheme of things. Roto is pretty hardcore and can be very unforgiving, but it's still a totally viable experience. Hopefully I have given a bit of insight into how these formats differ. If you are a roto player who is on the fence, maybe give H2H a try next season. It's definitely a different experience as a whole, but not one you should shy away from!