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March 11, 2016 - by Tom Federico
As a follow up to our initial post on the implications of bracket pool scoring systems, we’re going to examine the most common scoring rules used to encourage players to make riskier picks in their brackets.
Because they make it possible for unexpected outcomes to cause big swings in the pool standings, upset bonus points or seed-influenced base scoring can provide a much more entertaining experience for bracket pool participants.
However, these types of bracket pools also offer a big edge to advanced players (and, by extension, customers of our NCAA Bracket Picks product) who have the skills to analyze the precise implications of a more complicated scoring system.
If you’re looking to spice up your 2016 NCAA bracket pool experience by encouraging participants to make riskier picks, there are two fairly established structures for doing so:
These two structures are not exactly the same. Let’s take a deeper look.
Pools with upset bonuses award participants extra points if they correctly pick a team to advance, and they beat a better-seeded team in doing so. These bonus points are awarded in addition to any points typically given for picking a winner correctly.
Put another way, upset bonuses depend on the relative seed numbers of both teams that end up playing in a game, not just on the seed number of the team you pick to advance. That’s the key difference between an upset bonus scoring system and seed-influenced base scoring.
With the upset bonus framework, it’s important to note that there is only one tournament round in which the seed numbers of all opposing teams are known in advance, and for which pool participants have all the data they need to evaluate the risks and benefits of picking lower seeded teams to win — the first round.
Future rounds are a different story, because there is uncertainty regarding seeds. For example, with upset bonuses, if you pick a 12 seed to win its first two games, you don’t know in advance how many bonus points you’ll earn if that outcome actually plays out.
That’s because there’s some chance that your 12 seed pick ends up playing a 13 seed in the second round, if the 13 seed also pulls off a first round upset. If that happens, your pick’s second win is not considered an upset, since it came against a team with a worse seed.
The most common way of awarding upset bonus points is what we refer to as “seed difference.” In this setup, the number of bonus points awarded for a seed-based upset equals the difference in seed number between your pick and the team it defeats.
To illustrate, let’s say you pick a 12 seed to beat a 5 seed in the first round, in a traditional 1-2-4-8-16-32 points-per-round pool. With a seed difference upset bonus, if your pick wins, you get the standard 1 point for picking a first round winner plus 7 upset bonus points (12 minus 5), for a total of 8 points.
(As an aside, this type of pool, featuring 1-2-4-8-16-32 round-based scoring but with a seed difference upset bonus, appears to be the most popular risk-encouraging bracket pool scoring system, and roughly 60% of upset bonus pools set up in our system used this exact structure.)
Note that with the addition of a seed difference upset bonus, a 12 seed beating a 5 seed is suddenly worth 8 times the points of the 5 seed winning. It’s also worth the same number of points as correctly picking a team to make the Final Four!
These types of scoring effects are what make upset bonuses so crazy and fun. But this one example also provides a sense of how dramatically upset bonuses impact the optimal picking strategy for a bracket pool.
Because it’s highly unlikely for a poorly seeded team to make it very deep in the tournament, it’s rarely going to be worth it to abandon an otherwise well-reasoned set of Final Four picks or beyond just to try to get some more upset bonus points.
Sure, deep runs by low-seeded teams are going to happen some years; everybody remembers when 11 seed VCU made the Final Four in 2011. But the odds that (1) a poorly seeded team makes an amazing Cinderella run and (2) that team just so happens to be the one you picked to do so in your bracket, are extremely low.
Also, because late round picks are worth so many points in the most popular bracket pool scoring system (1-2-4-8-16-32), lowering the odds of getting them right by picking a heavy underdog comes with a big opportunity cost. The expected benefits of upset bonus points won’t often justify taking the additional risk.
The early rounds are a much different story, though. In first round matchups, for instance, there are lots of “guaranteed” big differences in seed numbers. Also, the odds of several double-digit seeds making the Sweet 16 in any given year is far from a long shot, and those teams often beat two significantly higher seeded teams to make it there.
So the optimal strategy for seed difference upset bonus pools often boils down to being very aggressive with early round picks, without getting too risky with your end game.
Besides upset bonuses, the other way to encourage more risky picks in your pool is to make a team’s seed number a factor in the points awarded for every game it wins — regardless of whether a win came against a better-seeded team or not.
To explain, let’s again use the example of successfully picking a 12 seed to win two games. In seed-influenced base scoring, you would be guaranteed a points boost for both of those wins, even if your 12 seed ended up beating a 13 seed in the second game.
These scoring structures seem to have increased in popularity in recent years, perhaps because they offer a somewhat simpler and less random incentive structure for rewarding risky picks.
More importantly, compared to upset bonuses, seed-influenced base scoring can provide much greater incentives to pick underdogs to make deep runs in the bracket. Those incentives also have a huge impact on strategy.
These scoring structures typically attach a seed-driven adjustment to the familiar round-based scoring system, and two variants are most popular:
In this structure, you simply add the winning team’s seed number to the round-based points earned for a win.
So if your pool was using a “1-2-4-8-16-32 + Seed” scoring system back in 2011, and you correctly picked 11 seed VCU to make the Elite 8, you would have earned:
In addition, your points earned would have remained the same regardless of the seed numbers of the teams VCU beat along the way.
This structure works the exact same way, except you multiply the winning team’s seed number by the round-based points earned for each win.
In “1-2-4-8-16-32 x Seed” scoring, that same VCU-to-the-Elite 8 pick in 2011 would have earned you:
As you can see, those points add up fast in the later rounds, especially when every win by VCU is worth 11 times what picking a 1 seed to win would earn you in the same round.
In Round + Seed and Round x Seed scoring structures, even modestly aggressive picks in the later rounds can make a big difference in final scores.
Using traditional 1-2-4-8-16-32 scoring for the round-based, consider the following percentage increases in point values for picking an upset, compared to picking the favorite:
1 – Correctly picking a 10 seed to beat a 7 seed in the first round, instead of picking the 7 seed to win
2 – Correctly picking the 4 seed in a region to make the Final Four, beating all the favorites along the way, instead of picking the 1 seed to make it
As you can see, the seed difference upset bonus puts a much higher relative premium on early round upsets, while Round x Seed scoring places a much higher premium on picking lower seeds to make deep tournament runs. Round + Seed gives more moderate bonuses in both cases.
With large point swings made possible by riskier picks winning, upset- and seed-driven scoring systems provide a fun dynamic for your pool. They also confer a big advantage to skilled players who understand exactly how to adjust their picks for maximum effect.
Can casual players still win these pools? Sure. Occasionally, anyone can luck out and predict a big Cinderella run by a team that almost no one else picked. When that happens, the points accumulated from that one gambit can be enough to seal a pool victory when you use these types of scoring systems.
In the long term, though, optimal picking strategy in these types of pools requires not only an accurate assessment of every team’s odds to advance through the bracket, but also the analytical skill (and time) to calculate the risks and rewards of picking every team to advance to each successive round. And doing that well also depends on accurately projecting the picking patterns of all other opponents in the pool. The complexity quickly gets to be mind-boggling.
In a nutshell, that’s why we built our NCAA Bracket Picks product. It does all the necessary calculations to optimize brackets for upset bonus pools and seed-influenced pool scoring. The product supports all the scoring systems mentioned in this post.
Finally, the optimal brackets to play in some of these pools often end up being highly contrarian — downright scary looking even. And that’s yet another strike against the casual player. In these pools, the “best answer” requires a lot of confidence to stand behind. Without precise calculations backing them up, it’s hard to have confidence in set of very risky looking bracket picks, even when you know that those types of risks are being amply rewarded.
It’s simply against human nature to pick lots of teams expected to lose, even if objectively, it’s clearly the better strategy.
At the end of the day, though, fun definitely counts for something, and these types of pools can provide entertainment value in spades.
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