Author’s note: Author and influencer Tim Ferriss (tim.blog) has spent his life digesting complex and varied information to identify targeted, actionable solutions to problems, both personal and societal. On Friday, March 20th, he recorded an episode of his popular podcast The Tim Ferriss Show entitled How to Support Healthcare Workers Now — Plus Urgent Suggestions for Uber Eats, Hilton, Amazon, and More (#416) that aims to influence societal behavior toward actionable steps to combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. It’s an extremely important message, but given the challenges of quickly disseminating insights from audio, and/or the public’s media consumption preference for…

With the coronavirus causing the unprecedented cancellation of the 2020 NCAA men’s basketball tournament (not to mention all NCAA activities), its players and fans are left wondering what could have been of such a beloved annual ritual.

On Thursday’s CBS Sports’ Eye on College Basketball podcast (starting at 1:06:30), hosts Matt Norlander and Gary Parrish paid tribute to the season with a hypothetical run-through of the tournament based on Jerry Palm’s March 12th projected bracket. This got me thinking: could I actually simulate the tournament and identify the story lines of an alternate reality of March Madness 2020?

There have…

The Philadelphia 76ers are having a great season…at home. The NBA team has a 28–2 record when playing in South Philly, a 93% win percentage, while posting a 9–23 record on the road, a win percentage of only 30%. This 63 percentage point home-away split puts them on pace to be the only team in NBA history to win at least 90% of their home games and lose more than 2/3 of their road games.

What explains such a discrepancy? It’s well-documented that the effect of home-field advantage in the NBA is the largest among the regular season for the…

Use this strategy guide and tool to determine the best 2020 auction keepers

Each year, more and more leagues are transforming into keeper leagues, in which managers are permitted to keep one or more players from their previous year’s roster. Auction drafts are also becoming increasingly popular, providing players with the chance to draft any player on the board while managing a fixed salary cap.

As such, strategy for the combination of both these elements in auction draft keeper leagues is becoming increasingly important to give yourself an edge heading into the next season.

It’s common for fantasy managers to…

With the 2019 fantasy football season in the books, it’s time for a retrospective on the good, bad, and ugly trades we made this season.

To assist with this exercise, I built a tool to mathematically grade each trade based on how each player involved in the trade performed the remainder of the season.

Make a copy of my Trade Evaluator spreadsheet to enter all the trades you made throughout the course of the season and see, mathematically, the results of those trades, including your “Trade Grade” of A+ to F.

Forget fantasy football. Now you can play “fantasy politics”.

Editor’s note: Registration for the 5th season of Fantasy Politics 2020 ends Sunday, September 1st, 2019 at midnight. Pick a team name and select three candidates for your lineup under the $20,000 salary cap who you think will earn the most media attention the following week. Jump to the middle of this post for more information on the rules and how to play.

FiveThirtyEight recently posted a quiz asking its readers to distinguish between quotes taken from sporting events and quotes taken from political commentary following this summer’s Democratic debates. …

Author’s note: The tournament has ended! For the second year in a row, my model picked the winner correctly, even if it did require a bit of late-game heroics by UVA throughout the tournament to be crowned champions. My more adventurous suggestions of Michigan State over Duke and dark horses Auburn and Oregon weren’t too bad either. Until next year!

Last year I shared the in-depth method I used to fill out my NCAA basketball tournament bracket using the optimal mathematical strategy. It worked out well for me — I correctly picked the tournament winner and ranked in the 94th…

My wife and I moved from our home in Washington, D.C. to Mexico City, Mexico in February 2019. Moving internationally can be stressful for many reasons, but one of the things that causes me particular anxiety is the thought of having to navigate a new airport, in a new country, in a foreign language. Add in the fact that we were transporting nine (9!) suitcases on a long flight and on (increasingly) empty stomachs…there was a lot that could have gone wrong.

This anxiety drove me to do as much research as I could about the process of moving our…