Bracket Picking Guide: How To Win Your NCAA Bracket Pool (Part 2)

March 18, 2014 - by Tom Federico

(This post is a continuation of Part 1 of our Bracket Picking Guide.)

Step 1: Know Your Enemy

Odds are that you know most, or at least some, of the people in your bracket pool. You know where they live. You know where they hang out. You probably have a sense of which of them are avid followers of college hoops.

These are your enemies.

As with any tactical operation, you’re only as good as your intel. So you need to gather it. Buy your office pool opponents a beer and ask them what teams they like, which they think are the can’t-miss picks. Find out who they think the sleepers are, and especially, what teams they think will go deep in the tourney.

Keep a little list of the team names that you keep hearing mentioned. Better yet, find a crafty way to get your adversaries to show you their bracket sheets. Getting a competitor to show you their bracket is like asking Achilles to show you his heel, but many people are so proud of their picks they’ll gladly share.

Unless your pool is small, you won’t be able to scout every single opponent. That’s when public picking trends come into play. Sites like ESPN and Yahoo! publish tables of “Who Picked Whom” national picking data from their popular bracket contests. Find those pages and devour the information, as it is pure bracket strategy gold. It also helps to average the numbers across several sites to get a more balanced perspective.

Step 2: Identify Value Picks

Once you have a sense of how your opponents are picking, you can begin plotting their destruction. For starters, take everything that any talking head has ever told you about how to pick a bracket and forget it. Even if you need to watch fifteen reruns of Charles In Charge to block conventional bracket picking wisdom out of your mind, do it.

Now that your mind is clear, your new objective is simple. Your mission, by and large, is to find games that feature meaningful differences between:

  1. The odds of a team winning a bracket matchup, and…
  2. The percentage of people in your pool that will likely pick that team to win

Unless you’re in a very small pool where you know everyone’s picking tendencies, the best approach for #2 is to use public picking data as your starting point, and then apply some subjective adjustment for local or other biases.

For example, if you live in Charlottesville, Virginia, odds are that your pool is full of people irrationally biased towards the Cavaliers this year. So make an educated guess and bump up the public picking percentages a few points for Virginia; ditto if your pool is usually biased toward a specific conference or filled with alumni of a specific school in the 2014 tourney.

However, there are some caveats for applying this logic. For example, you need to be extra careful about making an upset pick over a team that has strong odds of going deep in the tournament. Knocking off a potential Final Four team in the early rounds just because they’re not a top seed or their odds to win a game are being slightly overrated by the public is almost certainly not a good call. For instance, both #1 Florida and #4 Louisville have solid Final Four odds this year; picking them to lose early is very risky.

Part 3 of our Bracket Picking Guide explores two more important bracket strategies.

Read Part 3 »