NCAA Bracket Contests Explained: A Guide to March Madness Pools

March Madness, the annual NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, is one of the most popular sporting events in the United States. This exciting tournament generates widespread interest, with millions of people participating in March Madness pools, a form of sports betting where participants predict the outcome of each tournament game. Filling out a bracket for the NCAA tournament has become a beloved tradition for sports fans and casual observers alike. This article delves into the intricacies of NCAA bracket contests, exploring the format, scoring systems, odds, and strategies involved.

What is a March Madness Bracket?

The March Madness bracket is a visual representation of all the teams in the tournament and the path they have to follow to the Final Four and the championship game. The tournament field comprises 68 teams who play NCAA Division I college basketball. Among the field, 31 automatic bids are given to winners of each conference, usually via a season-ending conference tournament. The other 37 teams receive at-large bids from a selection committee. The four lowest ranked automatic bid teams and the four lowest ranked at-large teams in the tournament play in special play-in games called the First Four at the start of the tournament. The rest of the field is split into four regions of 16 teams, and those regions are seeded from 1 to 16. The top team in each region plays the 16th team, the second plays the 15th and so on.

How to Participate in NCAA Bracket Contests

March Madness pools are private gambling-related contests in which participants predict the outcome of each tournament game, filling out a complete tournament bracket in the process. The annual tournament bracket can be completed online or printed out and completed by hand whereby, prior to the tournament, participants predict the outcome of each tournament game. Each participant's predictions are compared against the others in a given pool. To get involved, you can sign up for the Men's and Women's Bracket Challenge games. The Bracket Challenge Game, the official bracket game of the NCAA, will open immediately after the committee announces the field on Selection Sunday. The brackets will lock before the first game of the first round begins, so get your picks in before then.

Filling out a bracket is a low-cost, high-benefit endeavor. You can fill out a bracket virtually through NCAA.com’s Official Bracket Challenge. Sign up for free, if you haven’t already done so, and start picking a winner for every matchup! Once your bracket is complete, watch those games live on TV or stream on the March Madness Live app.

Understanding Seeds and Matchups

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is made up of 68 teams. On Selection Sunday, before any tournament game is played, those teams are ranked 1 through 68 by the Selection Committee, with the best team in college basketball - based on regular season and conference tournament performance - sitting at No. 1. Those 64 teams are split into four regions of 16 teams each, with each team being ranked 1 through 16. In order to reward better teams, first-round matchups are determined by pitting the top team in the region against the bottom team (No. 1 vs. No. 16). Then the next highest vs. the next lowest (No. 2 vs. No. 15), and so on.

The Spontaneity of March Madness

The beauty of March Madness is in its spontaneity. “Upset” wins - in which a higher seed team beats a lower seed team - are common. Because of the nature of such a large single-elimination tournament, every game matters. You’ll root for outcomes that are favorable to your bracket. This is one reason March Madness is such a thrilling event - you can quickly become a fan of the teams you’ve picked, even if you know next to nothing about them. Not to mention, every game is fast-paced and jam-packed with action. Even if you’re not a sports fan, March is a chance to feel like one.

Scoring Systems in March Madness Pools

Various scoring systems exist to award participants for correctly predicting the results of March Madness games. Various scoring systems exist to award points for correct predictions, and various alternative games related to March Madness predictions exist.

There is no universal way to score the bracket. There are 6 rounds to the NCAA tournament, for each correct winner picked, a player is awarded points based on what round the winner is picked in. In most cases, the points per round increase as the tournament progresses.

Common Scoring Methods

1-2-4-8-16-32: This structure places a very high importance on getting your late-round picks correct. When the total points available to be won in each tournament round is the same (32), it means getting just one of your NCAA finalist picks right is worth the same as getting a whopping 16 first round games right.
1-2-3-4-5-6: In those types of bracket pools, early round games are much more likely to have a big impact in determining the pool winner, so your bracket picks in those rounds especially should look much different.

Incorporating the First Four Games

The NCAA committee has decided they need to have a couple of 11 and 13 seeds participate in these play-in games instead of two of the 16 seeds.

Here are a couple of options for incorporating these games into your office pool:

Read also: Crafting Your NCAA Profile

Score the play-in games as you would any game in the first round.
Change your entire point system around to be 7 rounds

Bonus Points

You can always add your own twist to the office pool. Some people award bonus points for upsets picked in the first round.

Scoring Your Bracket

Each person has picked teams to win their game by writing each team's name in the next round of the bracket. Simply circle each team that was picked correctly and draw an "x" or a line through the incorrect games. Each circle would be worth the corresponding points per round.

The Odds of a Perfect Bracket

Correctly filling out a bracket with the winners of all 63 games is an incredibly difficult task that has never been accomplished. Various approaches have been taken to estimate the chance of predicting a perfect bracket. There are 263 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 unique combinations of winners in a 64-team bracket, meaning that without considering seed number, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are about 9.22 quintillion to 1. Other estimates of the chance of a perfect bracket, accounting for tournament trends (such as higher seeds typically being expected to win), have ranged from 1 in 576 quadrillion to 1 in 128 billion.

The longest a bracket has stayed perfect is 49 games in 2019. The streak encompassed the entire Round of 64 and Round of 32 before the first incorrectly predicted result occurred in the Sweet 16 round.

Factors Affecting the Odds

Seed Number: Accounting for tournament trends (such as higher seeds typically being expected to win) improves your chances of picking games.
Knowledge of the Sport: Any knowledge of the sport or tournament’s history improves your chances of picking games.

Strategies for Winning Your March Madness Pool

Unlike a lot of DFS tourneys these days, March Madness bracket contests are so popular with the general public that many of them are stocked with proverbial ‘fish’ - low skilled players making clearly suboptimal picks. Not to mention that you’re picking teams in your bracket, not players, so you don’t need to be a college basketball expert to get a big edge. Access to the right numbers and tools will get you there. Backed by nearly 15 years of research, here are strategies DFS players use every day that will give you a big leg up in your bracket contest.

Use Objective Predictions

There are over 4,000 games in a single college basketball season. To develop an intimate knowledge of every NCAA tournament team, a human brain would need to assimilate and process data from most (if not all) of those games. It’s simply not possible. As a result, everyone from casual fans to the so-called “expert” college basketball commentators on TV form biased opinions on teams based on imperfect data. And with 68 teams playing (and not known for sure until this past Sunday), it’s a lot harder for your opponents to get an edge just by watching more games than you.

In a season-long picking contest, only a (mostly lucky) handful of humans would pick college basketball winners more often than sophisticated computer models or projections implied by the betting markets. So having good models and a keen understanding of betting market expectations is the foundation of a winning bracket strategy.

Understand The Scoring System

Just like in DFS, a bracket pool’s scoring system can make a huge difference in the optimal strategy to win. You shouldn’t even start to think about making any specific picks until you’ve fully analyzed the implications of how your pool assigns points. If your pool uses this scoring system, focus the vast majority of your analysis time on your Final Four and beyond (maybe your Elite 8 and beyond in smaller pools), because pulling your hair out over first round picks is almost certainly going to be a waste of time, and time is short when brackets are due on Thursday.

In fact, research shows that most players in upset bonus pools aren’t nearly as aggressive as they should be when it comes to making risky picks. Taking a double-digit seed to the Elite 8 could very well be worth it from an EV standpoint.

Adjust Your Pick Strategy For Pool Size

In bracket pools, there is no prize for getting a certain number of picks right. You win your pool if and only if you score more points than everyone else. And the bigger your pool, the harder it is to score more points than everyone else. When you’re competing against hundreds or thousands of opponents in a bracket pool, the odds are high that a few of your enemies are going to get really lucky and finish with great scores, even if they’re not particularly skilled players.

Our research shows that in large bracket pools with standard scoring, it’s typically better to make some highly contrarian bets, and hope that it’s somewhat of a crazy year in terms of how the tournament plays out. As you may have guessed, smaller bracket pools call for a more conservative strategy. In fact, you can usually get a pretty solid edge in small pools by simply assuming that most of your opponents are likely to get much too risky with their picks, and letting them shoot themselves in the foot.

General Pointers

The lower the seed, the stronger the team. Conversely, the higher the seed, the weaker the team. By strength, we mean the total number of quality wins leading up to the start of March Madness.
You can accumulate points in every round, but they are not all evenly weighted. The closer the round is to the national championship game, the more points there are up for grabs.

Key Terms to Know

When discussing teams, there are a bevy of statistics, terms, and acronyms thrown out. There’s a team’s NET rankings and BPI. The SOS and the SOR. The automatic bid and the at-large bid.

At-large bid - The selection committee hands out 37 at-large bids to teams that did not win their conference tournament, but impressed the committee enough to earn a trip to the tournament.
Automatic bid - Each of the 31 Division I conferences awards an automatic bid to the team that wins the postseason conference tournament.
AP ranking - The Associated Press has been ranking the top basketball teams since 1948. The ranking has no official weight in the selection process.
BPI - College Basketball’s Power Index, invented by ESPN, is a statistic that measures how far above or below average every team is, and projects how well the team will do going forward.
The bubble - A team that is “on the bubble” for the NCAA tournament is one whose qualification for the tournament could go either way.
Cinderella - Much like the titular character from the fairy tale, a Cinderella team is one that is much more successful than expected.
Defensive efficiency - A simple statistic that calculates the points allowed per 100 defensive possessions.
Elite Eight - The fourth round of the tournament, when just eight teams remain.
Final Four - The fifth round of the tournament, when just four teams remain.
First Four - A new round was added to the format when the NCAA tournament was expanded to 68 teams.
First four out - fall in spots 69-72 when ranking all 68 teams in the NCAA tournament.
Last four in - refers to the final four teams that receive at-large bids to the tournament.
NET - NCAA Evaluation Tool was a new ranking in 2018-19 that relies on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses.
Offensive efficiency - Points scored per 100 offensive possessions.
Per-40 stats - A reference used to compare two or more players who do not play the same amount of minutes per game.
Quadrants (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) - In order to determine the strength of a team’s wins or losses, the selection committee divides the team’s record into four quadrants on each team sheet.
Regional - The NCAA tournament bracket is split into four regionals: The South, East, West, and Midwest.
Seed - Each of the 68 teams earn bids to the NCAA tournament, and each one receives a seed - from 1 to 16 -that determines where the team will be placed in the bracket.
Selection committee -The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Committee is responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field for the NCAA Tournament.
Selection Sunday - The day everyone waits for, when the Selection Committee announces the tournament field.
Strength of record - From ESPN: “Strength of Record (SOR) is a measure of team accomplishment based on how difficult a team's W-L record is to achieve.
Sweet 16 - The third round of the tournament, where only 16 teams remain.
Team sheet - A one-page document for every team in Division I that helps the committee get a complete picture of that team’s performance during the season.

The History of March Madness Pools

The public didn't always scramble to fill out brackets and join March Madness pools every March. The NCAA tournament’s bracket was volatile through much of its first half-century, with the format and number of teams changing multiple times throughout, leading to some brackets that were far from user-friendly.

According to the Smithsonian, the first bracket pool started in 1977 in a Staten Island bar, where 88 people filled out brackets and pitted them against each other's.

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