Game Theory And Your March Madness Tournament

It’s time!

The madness is about to begin and chances are you’re playing in some kind of bracket contest if you’re reading this article. And you’re looking to win it all too because you’ve stumbled across this article and think I can help you. Perhaps I can… or perhaps I’m just an online marketing genius.

I compete in a rather large contest each year with over 2,000 brackets. When you play in a contest of this size, it’s not as simple as just advancing favorites each game. If your goal is to just get as many games correct as possible, that’s probably a good strategy. But your goal is to outscore your opponents.

In most bracket contests, points double each round meaning you get more points for later games guessed correctly. Some of you are probably even in an upset pool where you get bonus points for seed differential. This is where being contrarian will work to your advantage going against the grain.

Hometown Favorites

Know the pool you’re in.

I’m from Gainesville so any time the Gators make the tournament, they are always over compensated. For example, in 2014 when they were a #1 seed they were picked by 36% of the 2,366 brackets to win it all. Absolutely egregious.

For the record, FiveThirtyEight had Florida chance of winning it all at the beginning of the tournament at 14%. That’s a huge surplus of confidence in my fellow Gainesville bracketeers.

There’s no leg up on the competition betting with my heart here. After all, I’d gladly donate $20 to a prize pool to have my team win a championship and reap no rewards from it so why not bet against where an overconfident field of brackets are going to gain an advantage if they’re wrong?

If I pick Florida to win it all it means I have to still out perform 36% of the field with the rest of my picks. Not really exciting to get the champion right and still have a good chance of winning 0 money.

The point I’m trying to make is know your pool. If there’s a hometown bias and that team makes the tournament, think twice before moving them too far regardless of the seed they received.

Odds to Win

One of my favorite things to do when filling out a bracket is to compare odds for teams to make it to certain rounds and look for mismatches in national bracket contests. For example, ESPN gives breakdowns of what % of people picked a team to get to a certain round.

At the time of writing this story, there haven’t been enough brackets filled out to show a % of picks just yet. But maybe by the time you read this, that page should have some data that you can then compare to FiveThirtyEight or NumberFire ($) odds to win pages and find discrepancies where teams aren’t getting picked as good as their odds are to make it and to fade teams getting picked much higher than their odds.

When you factor this in with any Hometown Favorite bias, you put yourself in a great position to be contrarian in your bracket contest and reap the rewards for when public opinion doesn’t happen.

This method is great for large entry contests where payouts or prizes are very top heavy and you have to go outside of saying all the #1 seeds make the Final Four. If you’e in a contest with just a couple dozen brackets, it doesn’t pay nearly as much to fade the chalk.

Right now, it really feels like UNC might be a solid #1 seed option to look at sending all the way with the buzz around Kentucky. We’ll see when the nation starts filling out their brackets more but that’s a team I’m keeping an eye on for sure. Arizona and Louisville are two other teams I’m interested in seeing public perception on as well.

Who do you have winning it all?