Last Man Standing rules, explained
Everything you need to agree before your club's competition kicks off — including the three rules that cause every argument.
The basic rule
Each gameweek, every player picks one team they think will win. If that team wins, the player survives. If the team loses or draws, the player is eliminated. The last player standing wins.
That's the whole game. Everything below exists because real competitions run into edge cases.
Rule 1: a draw is a loss
This trips up newcomers every single season. You are not picking a team to avoid defeat — you are picking a team to win. A goalless draw away at a relegation side ends your run just as surely as a 4–0 hammering.
Say it explicitly when you announce the competition. Someone will still be surprised.
Rule 2: each team once
A player cannot pick the same team twice. This is what stops everyone simply backing the title favourites every week and makes the middle of the season genuinely difficult.
You need to decide what happens when a player has used every team:
- Pool reset (most common). After all twenty teams, everything becomes available again and the cycle restarts.
- Hard stop. The competition is declared over after twenty gameweeks and the remaining players split the pot.
The reset is the better rule for a club competition — it lets the season run its natural length instead of ending arbitrarily in January.
Rule 3: the deadline
Picks lock at the first kickoff of the gameweek, not at each individual match. If you allow picks right up to each kickoff, a player watching the Saturday lunchtime result can change their Sunday pick with far better information than everyone else.
Picks should also be hidden until the deadline passes. Otherwise late pickers can simply copy whoever they think knows best.
What happens if someone forgets
You have three options, and it's worth choosing before it happens:
| Approach | What happens | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic elimination | No pick, you're out | Harsh; loses players early and creates bad feeling |
| Auto-assign a team | A team from their remaining pool is picked for them | Fairest; keeps people involved |
| Roll their previous pick | Their last team carries over | Breaks the one-team-once rule |
Auto-assigning is what most well-run competitions settle on, and it's what this app does.
Postponements and abandoned matches
If a match is postponed, the pick simply stays pending until it's played. Don't eliminate anyone on a game that hasn't happened, and don't let them switch to a different team either — they made their choice.
When everyone goes out at once
It happens more often than you'd think, usually in a chaotic midweek round. Two accepted resolutions:
- Rollover. Results stand, nobody is eliminated, everyone continues. The competition can't end without a winner.
- Split the pot. Everyone who was still standing shares the prize.
Whichever you pick, write it down before week one.
The pot
Set a single entry fee — £5 and £10 are the usual figures for a club competition. Then decide what happens to the money:
- Winner takes everything.
- A split — often 80% to the winner, 20% to club funds.
- Places paid — winner and runner-up, if you expect a big field.
Announce this alongside the rules. Changing it later, once someone is close to winning, is how a fundraiser turns into a falling-out.
Before you start, publish: the entry fee, what the pot pays out, the deadline, what happens on a missed pick, and what happens if everyone goes out. Five lines in the group chat prevents every dispute you're going to have.
Running it without a spreadsheet
All of the above is easy to state and tedious to enforce by hand — especially tracking which of twenty teams each of forty players has already used. LMS Picks applies these rules automatically and keeps an audit trail of every pick, so when someone insists they picked differently, you have the record.