Bracket Picking Guide: How To Win Your NCAA Bracket Pool (Part 5)

(This post is a continuation of Part 4 of our Bracket Picking Guide.)

Conclusion

A lot of people will read our bracket picking guide and say, “Whatever. Winning a bracket pool just comes down to luck anyway. Last year Sally in accounting won the March Madness office pool picking by team colors, and my great grandmother knows more about college basketball than her. Research like this doesn’t mean squat in the end, it’s all a crapshoot anyway.”

We would never argue that winning a bracket pool in any given year doesn’t require luck. It’s ridiculous to imagine anyone, even with the best bracket research at their disposal, being 25 or 50 times better at making picks than all the other people in their pool — in other words, good enough to expect to win a smaller sized pool each and every year.

As a result, paying some money to enter a bracket pool will always be a very risky use of your money. On the grand scale of risk, let’s consider two extremes of what you could do with $25 this month:

  1. Put it in a savings account that earns 0.5% interest
  2. Spend it all on Mega Millions lottery tickets

The first option is pretty much a sure thing to leave you with $25.01 at the end of March Madness — a whopping one penny in interest. The second option is pretty much a sure thing to leave you with nothing, but does come with a miniscule probability of making you fabulously wealthy. Bracket pools are no Mega Millions, but in terms of risk, they’re much closer to lotteries than to savings accounts.

The difference between bracket pools and lotteries is that in bracket pools, you can get a significant edge over everyone else playing. But only if you adopt the right strategies. Knowing how to identify inefficiencies, adjust for your competition’s biases, and match overall bracket risk to the rewards at stake means you will need less luck to win. Based on our numbers, it’s not unreasonable to generate as high as a 5-10x edge (or even more, in huge pools) over your average pool opponent. You won’t see the results frequently, but over the course of your lifetime you will win a lot more bracket pools than your friends do.

Admittedly, that last part — the long term time horizon — makes it difficult for a lot of people to blindly place and keep their faith in the optimal strategies for winning bracket pools. If the NCAA tournament happened once a month, it would be a lot more clear who the most skilled bracket pickers are. In reality, the best bracket pickers in the world may not even finish in the top 50% in any one particular tournament.

This is just the nature of pools, though. Occasional wins more than make up for years of losses. If you are able to stick with the right strategy for the long term, you stand a great chance of profiting in the end.

If you choose to pick your own bracket this year, do your best to be objective and to think about value and risk when you make your picks. Think about those people who always pick a decent number of winners every year — primarily because they pick mostly favorites — but still rarely ever win the pool. The reality is that they’re fighting the wrong battle. Unknowingly, they are employing a bracket picking strategy focused more on avoiding a bad score than on maximizing their odds to come in first place.

If you don’t employ an appropriate risk based strategy given your pool size, scoring system, and opponent tendencies, then you’ve given up a huge potential edge before the tournament even starts. The most likely winner of the 2014 NCAA tournament may well be a terrible pick for winning your pool, and the sooner you understand why, the sooner you’ll start winning more often.

Enjoy the Madness in 2014,

The Team Rankings Nerds

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