Herzig: How to Beat Underdog’s Eliminator Tournament (2025)

The Eliminator contest is a new best ball format introduced in 2023 that was well received by the community. The general concept is rather than a traditional regular season and playoff rounds, each week brings with it the need to perform well and advance to the next round. In 2024, Underdog brought the contest back with a bit of a twist: finish in at least the top half each week and make the finals to compete against 115 other teams. This format combined the high-floor regular-season strategy with a need to still build a lineup that can thrive in a Week 17 final.

In 2025, Underdog has revamped the structure again and landed on a fantastic tournament. Finish in the top half every week and you make it a three-person final. And to make the sweat that much more exciting, after the first week where you compete against the people you drafted against, every other week is a head-to-head contest until you reach the finals. For all intents and purposes, this is a best ball H2H bracket contest. And the strategy for winning this contest is very different than how we traditionally approach best ball. Let’s dive in!

It is best to think about the regular season as 16 different cash games, with strategy focusing more on avoiding disastrous performances than chasing high scores. Let’s start by reviewing the structure and goals of this contest. These are traditional 18-round drafts with the traditional starting positions for best ball. The difference is there is no regular season or playoffs. Each week, you compete against the team(s) in your pod to advance to the following week vs. a new opponent. Our goal is simply to beat our opponent each week to make it to the finals in Week 17. Now, how do we do that? That’s what I’ll try to cover in this article, breaking it down into three key themes: 1) Balance, 2) Prioritizing Median Outcomes, and 3) Bye Weeks.

You can also save this chart as a helpful resource as it provides how well you need to do each week. And once the schedule is released, we’ll include bye weeks for each team.

Balance

While traditional best ball can be won with more extreme strategies, such as hyperfragile RB or only taking one elite QB and/or TE, we need to prioritize an overall more balanced strategy for The Eliminator. Compared to traditional best ball where in the regular-season pods you often need to finish top 2/12 to advance, finishing third or fourth is no different than 11th or 12th. Thus we take risks in hopes of winning our leagues because it doesn’t matter if we finish middle of the pack. And for large tournaments, where we have to beat out hundreds of people in the final week, let alone ~15 others in multiple prior playoff rounds, we want to hit on players and roster constructions that give us that potential outlier upside.