Most leagues on Real Odds Parlay are standard leagues: everyone plays into a shared Units leaderboard and you're really competing against the whole field at once. A head-to-head league works differently. Players are paired off week by week, and instead of a Units leaderboard you build a win/loss/tie record against the specific opponents you're matched with — closer to a fantasy-football schedule than a running scoreboard. This guide explains how a head-to-head league plays from a member's seat, and how an owner sets one up.
Head-to-head isn't a choice on the Create League form — every league starts standard. An owner switches a league to head-to-head afterward by setting League Format to head-to-head on the Advanced League Settings page. Because that decision reshapes how the whole league is scored, it's meant to be made before the season starts; once the league's start date passes, its settings lock in.
A head-to-head league needs a schedule before anyone has an opponent. The league owner does this once, from the league's bracket page, with the Generate schedule button. Generating locks the current roster into a round-robin rotation for the season — a fixed order in which every player faces every other player. Until the owner generates it, members simply see a "waiting on the league owner to generate the schedule" notice.
Once the schedule exists, each member's bracket page has three parts:
This week shows your current matchup — "You vs. <opponent>" — for the round that's currently live. If you're the odd player out for the week, you'll instead see a bye or lucky-bye notice here (see Bye Handling below).
Standings is the league table, ranked by record. Each row shows the player and their W, L, and T (matchup wins, losses, and ties) for the season so far. Your own row is highlighted so you can find yourself at a glance. Note that these are matchup wins and losses — who beat whom head-to-head — not the raw Units totals a standard league would rank you by.
Full schedule lays out every round of the season, grouped by round, each with its date range. As rounds resolve, each matchup shows its result — who won, or a status like upcoming, tie, bye, or "vs. bot."
Within a given week you still make picks the normal way for your league's format. At the end of the week, your results are compared against your assigned opponent's, and whoever did better takes the matchup — a win on your record rather than a change in a Units total. If the two of you finish even, the league's tiebreak method decides what happens (below).
Byes only come up when a league has an odd number of players, since someone has to sit out each round. The owner picks how that's handled, and it's worth knowing which rule your league uses because it affects your record:
When a weekly matchup ends even, the tiebreak method decides the outcome. Real tie lets it stand as a tie on both records. Break by that week's win count instead looks at how many individual games each of you got right that week and awards the matchup to the higher count, only falling back to a tie if those are equal too.
The schedule repeat setting decides what happens once everyone has faced everyone once. The league can either keep rotating through the rotation again for the rest of the season, or stop scheduling new matchups after that first full pass.
A head-to-head league can end its season with a playoff phase. There's no separate on/off switch — choosing a playoff format is what turns playoffs on. Single elimination ("sudden death") stops regular-season scheduling at the playoff start date and moves to a knockout bracket. Total units (cumulative) also stops the regular season at that date, but rather than eliminating anyone, every pick across the playoff window counts and whoever gets the most right wins. Double elimination is planned but not yet available.
Every head-to-head option above — league format, bye handling, tiebreak method, schedule repeat, and playoff format — lives on the Advanced Settings page and is explained field by field in the Advanced Settings Reference. Set them before your start date, since the league locks once it begins.