2010 NCAA Tournament Betting Picks Results

April 6, 2010 - by Tom Federico

We split last night’s NCAA championship game, hitting our 2-star ATS play on Butler +7 and missing our totals pick (over 128.5), although the totals play was only a one-star play with 50.8% odds.

Here’s how our 2010 NCAA tournament betting pick performance ended up overall:

ATS Picks

13-6-3 (68.4%, +5.8 units) for 2-star or better picks
36-24-3 (60.0%, +8.7 units) overall

Totals Picks

23-14 (62.2%, +6.9 units) for 2-star or better picks
42-21 (66.7%, +17.2 units) overall

With a sample size of 63 games, luck and randomness almost certainly play a role in NCAA tournament betting results, and likely did for us as well. For example, our 2009-10 season performance for ATS and Totals predictions was solidly profitable for 2-star or better picks, but did not achieve 60%+ win rates.

(Show us a handicapper that claims 60%+ bet win rates over 2,000 or 4,000 NCAA games, and we’ll show you a liar…)

At the same time, the performance of good algorithmic models often improves as the underlying data set expands, so it benefits us, given our methods, that March Madness comes at the end of a 30+ game season. By the time the tournament rolls around, strong public sentiments have formed around teams, players, and coaches. Our 100% algorithmic approach is good at quickly identifying potential inaccuracies in those sentiments.

Overall, we’re very happy with the stellar performance of our betting picks during the 2010 tourney and we hope our customers were able to profit handsomely from it. We did especially well in the big games this year, going on a 13-1 run from the Elite 8 onward.

In the end, $100 unit bettors would have finished up 25.9 units, or +$2,590 by playing all of our betting predictions (126 total bets) for the 2010 NCAA tournament. That represents a 20.6% return on total risked capital of $12,600 over three weeks, or an annualized return on investment of over 350%.

For comparison, the Dow Jones has risen about 2% since the NCAA tournament began. Even given a stock market rally, betting our predictions this year would still have provided 10x the returns of the Dow — although the risk profile of sports wagering is quite a bit different!