Traditionally, an anti-windup compensator is activated when control signal saturation occurs. An alternative approach is to activate the compensator at a level below that of the physical control constraints: the anti-windup compensator is activated in anticipation of actuator saturation. Recent studies have proposed systematic methods for the construction of such anticipatory anti-windup compensators, but a pseudo-LPV representation of the saturated system has been central to these results. This paper approaches the anticipatory anti-windup problem for open-loop stable plants using a ‘non-square’ sector condition, which is associated with a combination of deadzone nonlinearities. The advantage of this approach is that it leads to synthesis routines, which bear a close resemblance to those associated with traditional immediately activated anti-windup compensators. A by-product of this approach also appears to be that the arising compensators are better numerically conditioned. Some simulation examples illustrating the effectiveness of anticipatory anti-windup compensators and some comments on their wider use complete the paper. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.