With upgrade season upon us, its perhaps a good time to go through some rudimentary planing around the byes.

Cause really, nothing will kick your ass harder than running 5 upgrades over the next 5 weeks, and pushing yourself into 5 donuts come round 11.

So upload your team into TS, and join us over the break.

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Alright, so youve uploaded your squad? Excellent.

Now, head over to the ticker and overlay that bad boy. You should get a very good overview of what your team will look like when the byes hit us. Heres mine.

<img src="http://tooserious.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MyByes.png" width="470px">

Now, let first remember a couple of truths in the byes.

1. Unless you are rolling some kind of Lycett F/R trickery, and he plays, well, you *will* be coping two zeros. There is no avoiding this. No avoiding it, but you can choose where they happen.

2. There are three trades over the bye rounds. Meaning between 11 and 12, and 12 and 13, you can cash in 6 upgrade/downgrade trades to keep the duck eggs to a minimum.

3. On each line, we can have 2 players sitting out before hitting an egg (duuuur)

So, lets look at me. I know that I have a lot of work to move out of my GWS rookies between now and round 11.

What I can see however, by looking at the chart, is where I need to put them to be effected the least by the byes.

If I look at my round 13 players, I can see that, upon using 3 trades, I can avoid all zeros there, but its on the edge. So I need to revolve my upgrades around getting some more players into the round 12 bye.

Drilling deeper than that however, I can see that I only have 1 rookie on my list come round 12- Magner. This is a little worrying, as any movement to dodge the 0s will require sub-optimal sideways trades, which perhaps offers a little incentive to hold onto Magner for a few more weeks.

Regardless of that however, in a perfect world, I manage to move 3 forwards byes from round 11, to round 12. I get hit by my guaranteed two donuts in round 11, but have the squad perfect to cruise through unaffected after that.

Sounds perfect, but it does require each and every bench player playing- which goes to how important it is to trade down smartly this year.

Looking at this though, shows how important it is to plan all this out. For example, if I plan on bringing Spurr in for Ellis next week, a) for the downgrade option, but b) for the extra rookie in round 12, then it will mean that Ill need to bring in another round 13 player to even it up.

It also shows just how complex all this can become, when you start to dig deeper into it.

So how are you guys planing on getting through this thing?