The magic number, explained
The dollars-per-point conversion rate that sits underneath every price and every breakeven.
The magic number is the exchange rate between fantasy points and dollars. It is the quiet mechanism sitting underneath every price and every breakeven in NRL Fantasy, and once you can use it you can sanity-check any player's price in about five seconds.
What it actually is
Across the whole competition, prices and scoring have to stay in proportion — the game can't have points inflating while prices stand still. The magic number is the rate that keeps them aligned: roughly, the total value of all priced players divided by the total points they have scored.
For a given round, yafss computes the magic number as the sum of every priced player's price divided by the sum of their points. Because a single round's figure is noisy — bye rounds in particular throw it out badly — the site uses the average across the completed rounds of the season rather than the most recent round alone.
The one calculation worth memorising
Divide a player's price by the magic number and you get the score they are priced at — the average they need to sustain to justify their tag.
priced at = price ÷ magic number
Expect a player to average more than their priced-at score and they should make you money. Expect them to average less and they should lose value.
This is the benchmark that everything else is built on:
- Breakeven is essentially the gap between a player's priced-at score and their recent weighted average, scaled up.
- The price formula uses the magic number to convert a player's weighted scoring average into the dollar figure their price drifts towards each round.
- When a player misses a game, the model fills the gap with their priced-at score — which is why absences hold a price roughly steady rather than collapsing it.
Why it drifts during the season
The magic number is not fixed. It responds to competition-wide scoring conditions: a round of high-scoring, high-possession football pushes total points up relative to total prices, and a round of scrappy, low-completion football pushes them down. Bye and representative rounds distort it hardest, because a large slice of the player pool scores nothing at all while their prices remain in the denominator's sibling term.
This is exactly why yafss averages across completed rounds rather than taking the latest one. A breakeven built off a single bye-affected magic number would be materially wrong for every player on the list.
Using it in practice
The magic number turns vague price instincts into an arithmetic check. Before you buy anyone, ask: what does this player need to average to be worth this price, and do I actually believe they will average it?
yafss already does that arithmetic for you. Player pages show price, breakeven and projection side by side, and the tools let you scan the whole pool for players whose projection clears their priced-at score:
Player Finder Price Movers Position Tiers
It is also the cleanest way to think about a cash cow: a cheap player is a cash cow precisely when their expected scoring comfortably exceeds the low score their low price implies. The bigger that gap, the faster the money comes.