No salary involved at all. When you sign up, you get paired with 11 other randos, and you draft a team just like you would draft a home league. The only difference is that there are no waiver wire moves or roster decisions to be made over the course of the season. Each week, your top scores for each position(1qb, 2rb, 3wr, 1te, 1flex) count for points. Whole team gets hurt? Tough horsefeathers. Most people know which players are good, but the poor players draft QB too early and too often (even though a starting QB isn't outscoring other starting QBs by nearly enough to justify it.) The place to differentiate and give yourself the best shot at winning big is roster construction: just how many of each position to draft in total, and building in correlations for the playoff weeks. For instance, I drafted RB in each of my first three picks because I thought they were best talent available (zero RB was in vogue on this site.) If I have dreams of winning anything, those three are going to roll, and I just have to assume health, so I only took one more RB the entire draft and loaded up on WR to try and make up for quality with quantity (WR tends to be more boom/bust than RB anyways). And my Bengals "stack" really paid off in week 16 when I needed to beat 17 other teams to advance. Got it. So how does the regular season/playoffs work? Do you compete against the other 11 people you drafted against like normal fantasy football and the everyone who qualifies from their individual league (top whatever number of teams per league) competes against everyone else in one big group where a certain percentage of teams are eliminated each week? You got it. Different sites have different set ups. Underdog (.5 ppr) advances the top two per league after 14 weeks, then you get put in a random advancing group of 18, which advances top two in week 15. Then top 1/18 in week 16, and then you're down to the last 160. Draftkings (full ppr and yardage bonuses) had a top 2/12 through 14 weeks, then top 1/12, 1/12, and then I think it was a group of 220 at the end.