Bracket Picking Guide: How To Win Your NCAA Bracket Pool (Part 4)

(This post is a continuation of Part 3 of our Bracket Picking Guide.)

Step 5: Think About Hedging Your Bets

With most standard scoring systems, the following two areas of the bracket can play a big role in determining who wins the office pool:

  1. The games in the final few rounds (all the time)
  2. The middle seeded early round games (sometimes)

Early round games involving mid-seeded teams (say, 5-seeds through 12-seeds) can be important because there are many of those games, and on account of the voodoo inherent in the NCAA tournament selection process, higher performing teams often hide behind worse seed numbers. So these games often present opportunities to gain a little bit of ground, primarily if you find some good Sweet 16 value picks among this group.

The flip side, though, is that early round victories usually count for very little in most scoring systems. In fact, Round of 64 winners are only worth one measly point in most bracket pools. So there is a limit to the impact great picking can have in early round games. Even if you have the luck of your life and correctly pick six or seven first round upsets, the points you earn will be less than getting one more Final Four pick right.

Want to reduce stress in your life this week? Stop agonizing about upset picks for the Round of 64. It’s not worth the time.

The later round games, however, are a much different story. First, from the Elite Eight on, there are only a small number of games to pick between teams that likely have similar performance levels. As a result, luck plays a much greater role in the accuracy of your picks across the final rounds of the tournament. Still, you can absolutely position your bracket to overachieve in the late rounds with the right analysis of the right data.

For example, in our 2008 bracket, we got all the picks right from the Final Four onward. In researching picks, the BracketBrains analysis made it clear to us that the odds of all four 1-seeds making the Final Four were very high that year. (Despite what most people think, the four 1-seeds being the four most likely teams to win is an unusual occurrence, and having a Final Four composed of all 1-seeds is something we rarely recommend.) We didn’t argue with the data, and we had our best year ever. Getting our “Kansas over Memphis in the championship game” pick correct, however, ended up being quite lucky. Go watch the end of that one on YouTube.

One principle we often employ is to concentrate risk in one, but not both, of the two bracket areas mentioned above, as a type of hedging strategy. If you are very conservative in choosing the winners of your late stage games – let’s say you’ve got #1 Florida over #4 Louisville in the final this year – then you’re not differentiating yourself from many of your competitors. In this case, a more aggressive upset picking strategy in the earlier rounds should increase your relative odds to win your pool.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can go with a very conservative early bracket, and focus your risk on avoiding the most popular NCAA champion pick or putting a few very good but undervalued teams in the Final Four.

In small to midsized pools (between 25 to 100 people or so) especially, these types of risk hedging strategies have proven highly effective for us over the years. With that number of people, it usually takes some success at both ends of the bracket to win, but even just a highly effective early or late round strategy can secure a prize some years.

For huge pools, our research has shown that the top strategy usually — but not always — entails picking a highly unconventional national champion, and throwing in a several promising value-driven upset picks in the middle rounds as well.

A key takeaway about bracket risk is the general point that the risk level of your bracket picks doesn’t need to be consistent every round. Some people approach a bracket thinking they should be making roughly a certain number of upsets in each particular round. That logic doesn’t make sense.

Rather, the overall risk level of your bracket as a whole needs to be suitable for your pool size and scoring system. Risk comes in many different flavors. If you pick undervalued #6 Ohio State to win it all this year – which isn’t a bad strategy at all for huge pools – then the rest of your bracket should likely be replete with favorites, because you’re concentrating a lot of (calculated) risk in your NCAA champion pick.

Step 6: Don’t Be A Fool. Know the Rules of Your Pool.

It sounds silly, but it’s true. Most bracket pickers (a) don’t give more than two seconds of thought to the actual scoring system of their pool before they (b) dive into the process of trying to choose the most likely winners of every tournament matchup. Hopefully by now you understand why (b) is not always the optimal strategy.

Before you reach for that pencil to mark down your first bracket picks, make sure you are aware of the exact value each of your decisions carries. Think about it this way: if the NCAA made three pointers worth two points next year, who in their right mind would keep shooting from beyond the arc? Yet many people pick their brackets without so much as a glance at the scoring system.

There are hundreds of permutations of bracket scoring rules out there, and we can’t possibly outline specific tips for each one in this document. It’s truly beyond the capacity of the human mind to figure it all out, which is why we developed technology to do it for us. Our BracketBrains product runs millions of bracket pool simulations to determine the optimal bracket picks for all of the different popular scoring systems it covers: traditional 1-2-4-8-16-32 points per round, 1-2-3-4-5-6, Fibonacci, Round plus Seed, Round times Seed, upset bonues, no upset bonuses, and many others.

Without a computer’s help to find the best picks for your pool, it pays to at least remember two general guidelines related to scoring systems:

  1. If you’re playing with a traditional system that features increasing (typically doubling) points per correct pick as the rounds go on, with no bonus points for picking upsets, then it’s usually a bad move to eliminate a team with good odds to make a deep run in the first few rounds – unless you are making a calculated bet to have them lose to a team you’re picking to make deep run.
  1. If your scoring system has big upset bonuses, then your bracket should look entirely different. These types of pools often call for strategy more similar to the large pool examples mentioned earlier, but with lots more upsets mixed into the early rounds. These types of picks are far riskier, but the reward ratchets up considerably since they can earn you a bunch of extra bonus points.

We wrap it all up in the next and final post, Part 5.

Read Part 5 »