If you’re looking for some edge in NCAA brackets/Calcutta/survivor pools this year, we’ve set up a discount with our friends at PoolGenius (the new site from TeamRankings where all their bracket tools now live):
The 2023 PoolGenius bracket optimizer is here.
ETR subscribers can get discounts of 10-55% here.
Compete against the ETR community in our March Madness bracket pool!
In the words of Jon Rothstein: This is March.
On Sunday, the NCAA tournament selection committee revealed the 68 teams that will vie for college basketball’s most prestigious prize over the next three weeks.
The American Gaming Association estimated that 45 million Americans wagered $3.1 billion on the NCAA Tournament in 2022. The increased popularity of sports gambling has led to bracket pools taking up a smaller share of the pie — 76% of bets were placed outside of brackets last year, up from 55% in 2021 — but making a bracket is still indisputably the most accessible way to have some skin in the game. Even people who barely follow sports fill out a bracket — which means there’s a whole lot of fish in the water in many pools.
Most people don’t put much time, effort, or game theory knowledge into their bracket. That opens the door for savvy players to boast enormously +EV entries if they put in the work. Yes, making a bracket is supposed to be fun, and yes, there’s an argument it’s slightly pathetic to spend hours meticulously crafting the optimal bracket. But winning cures all, as they say, and the once-per-year nature and casual social aspect of bracket-making means the edge is alive and well in most pools. Today, we’ll dig into optimal bracket strategy to give you an edge over the competition.
Let the madness begin.
WHO SHOULD I PICK TO WIN IT ALL?
On ESPN, correctly picking the winner of a first-round game is worth 10 points. Identifying the national champion is worth 320 points. Unless a Cinderella team no one picked wins it all, you practically need to accurately pinpoint which team will be cutting down the nets in April. In my experience, the majority of people spend most of their time thinking through the Round of 64 games. That’s probably the most fun round with 32 games and upsets galore, but each individual first-round game is relatively meaningless compared to picking the overall champion. It’s virtually impossible to win most pools unless you nail who takes home the title. With that being said, that does not mean you should just pick the team with the best odds to win the title. There’s a difference between maximizing points expectation and maximizing bracket pool win probability.
In 2022, Gonzaga was the top overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. 27.2% of ESPN brackets chose the Bulldogs to finally get over the hump. That means even if you chose Gonzaga last year and they had actually won, you still would’ve needed to be better than 26 other people on average in a 100-person pool. KenPom, college basketball’s premier publicly available analytics site, gave the Zags a 27.5% chance of bringing the trophy home to Spokane. In other words, advanced metrics suggested there was no real edge in picking Gonzaga to win it all because their estimated win probability was in line with the percentage of brackets picking them.
Making a bracket is similar to DFS in this regard: It’s all about leverage. And just like in DFS, the need for contrarianism increases with pool size. If your pool is just you and one other person, picking the favorite is almost certainly the optimal move. In the best-case scenario, they don’t pick the favorite and you’re the only one with the chalk national champion. Worst case, you both have the same champion and it comes down to the rest of your bracket.
If you’re in a larger pool, you need to marry projected ownership with win probability. Sites like KenPom, FiveThirtyEight, and TeamRankings use a fairly sophisticated process to estimate each team’s probability of advancing to a given round. Sportsbooks post odds for each team to win the title and make the Final Four (and, as we get closer to the tournament, we’ll probably get odds to make the Elite Eight and Sweet 16) with massive liability should they misprice a certain team. Those sources give you a fairly objective view of each team’s real chances of cutting down the nets.
Payout structure is also a factor in creating an optimal bracket. If your pool only pays out the top spot, you need to embrace an all-or-nothing mindset and think through the scenarios that land you the top prize. That means if you pick Alabama this year in a decent-sized pool, you probably need to be relatively contrarian elsewhere because you need to beat out 25% of the pool even if the Tide win the whole thing. But if you’re in a double-up pool that pays the same amount to nearly half the field (which probably isn’t a thing but makes this example easy), you can stay pretty chalky throughout your bracket even if you take ‘Bama.
You can find projected bracket ownership on ESPN under the “Who Picked Whom” tab. Most pool-hosting sites have similar versions. If you’re in a private pool, it’s also a good idea to make a mental adjustment based on your pool’s demographics. For example, I’m an Illinois student, and two years ago we were a No. 1 seed. Almost everyone in my private pools picked the Illini to win it all, and my Gonzaga selection — the top overall seed — was actually contrarian. If you’re playing with friends and/or family, know their biases.
HOW CONTRARIAN DO I NEED TO BE?
With that in mind, it’s reasonable to wonder how contrarian you need to be. After all, it is March, and chaos is the only guarantee in the NCAA Tournament. The answer, as always, is it depends both on your pool size and who you picked as champion. If you’re in an enormous pool and backing Alabama to win it all — even though they appear overvalued according to current ownership projections — you need to be highly contrarian in the early rounds because you’re competing against so many other brackets for first place even if the Crimson Tide ship it. However, if you pick a team like Duke to win the title (which is unnecessary in all but the largest of pools), you can go slightly chalkier in the early rounds because your win condition is basically just Duke cutting down the nets. In big pools, some blend of these two options makes sense:
- If you pick a chalk champion in a big pool, you need to be contrarian elsewhere, whether that means picking a Cinderella Final Four team and/or making riskier picks in the early rounds.
- If you pick a contrarian champion (or generally go high-risk in the final rounds), there’s no need to strive for perfection early on, and you can play it safe by mostly relying on the models and odds.
That’s how it works in larger pools. In tiny pools, a fully chalk bracket (using sportsbook odds rather than seed lines) is almost certainly optimal. If your pool has fewer than ~20 people, having Alabama vs. Houston in your final is probably the best strategy, although ownership is still fluid at this point. ETR recently did a bracket strategy podcast with TeamRankings’ Jason Lisk — one of the foremost experts in pool strategy — and he stressed that the biggest mistake most people make is going overly contrarian in non-large pools.
It’s also worth noting that March Madness is a rare time when the public expects there to be upsets. The first round of the NCAA Tournament is 32 independent events; intuitively, the less likely outcome happens in some of them. The issue is it’s extremely difficult to predict in advance when the favorite will lose, and if you can predict it with any consistency, you should be winning millions in Vegas rather than worrying about your office bracket pool. Many people will force upsets in their bracket in the spirit of the madness, so it can sometimes even be optimal to pick the Vegas favorite in every first-round game. As usual, you can compare win probability (either from models or implied probability from money lines) to ownership percentage to identify leverage points. For example, Miami is currently only a 2.5-point favorite (-140 ML) vs. Drake in the first round, but 76.2% of brackets on ESPN have the Hurricanes advancing. Miami does have a key piece who’s questionable for the game, so that’s worth watching, but the Bulldogs could provide good leverage if you’re really hunting for a No. 12 over No. 5 upset in the Round of 64. Still, in small pools, you may be better off picking Miami because they are more likely to win and there’s no need to force contrarianism if you’re not competing against a lot of people, even if the contrarian play is a better value.
This all goes out the window if you’re in a non-standard pool where you get more points for correctly predicting an upset. If you’re in a pool like that, you could use a similar process as above to guess which upsets your opponents will take and then use Vegas odds to find leverage points. In most pools (basically any pool that isn’t tiny), you want to be contrarian in high-leverage spots. Your scoring settings and pool size impact which spots are high-leverage and how contrarian you need to be, respectively.
QUICK HITTERS
- There’s a lot of information that isn’t baked into models like KenPom (but likely is baked into sportsbook odds). For example, Tennessee’s starting point guard tore his ACL at the end of February and is out for the year. Arkansas recently got projected lottery pick Nick Smith back after the freshman missed most of the season. UCLA recently lost the best wing defender in the country to a torn Achilles. The models provide good information, but they don’t know everything (TeamRankings does make a manual adjustment for injuries).
- TeamRankings investigated whether past tournament success affected performance in the current year and found no correlation. However, they did find that the public overcorrected for tournament play in the previous season. Overcome your psychological biases about a team that burned you or was a Cinderella story in a past season and focus on current-season data.
- Ignore the trends that will dominate sports talk radio this week. You don’t have to pick a 12 seed to beat a 5, even if there likely will be at least one 5-12 upset. It’s just basic probability: All four 12 seeds are underdogs in the Round of 64, but the probability that all four lose (using KenPom) is 17.1%. Another example is when people say to avoid having all No. 1 seeds in the Final Four. That’s just one exact outcome out of many possible outcomes — so it’s certainly unlikely as an exacta — but it is one of the most probable exact outcomes.
TEAM RECOMMENDATIONS BY POOL SIZE
Finally, we’ll touch on some specific team recommendations based on pool size. This is inexact because we are using fairly large buckets (i.e. a 1,000-person pool shouldn’t be treated the same as a 10,000-person pool). Keep in mind that you don’t have to pick these teams to win it all either. For example, Creighton is a savvy contrarian play based on their analytical profile and ownership, but simply taking them as a Final Four team is probably as contrarian as you need to get unless your pool is truly massive.
Small pool (<25 people): Most people will likely go too contrarian. You are fine going mostly chalk and having Houston or Alabama (or Kansas or Purdue, if you think they’ve got what it takes) winning it all.
Medium (25-100): You are still probably fine playing it mostly safe. Maybe you take a Marquette, Duke, or Gonzaga-type team to the Final Four or pick someone besides Alabama to win it all.
Large (100+): Perhaps you consider taking a team like Gonzaga, who is eighth on KenPom and scorching hot over the past month, to the Final Four or national title game. UCLA similarly looks good in most metrics, although they recently lost the likely national Defensive Player of the Year to a torn Achilles and their starting center missed the Pac-12 championship game. Marquette and Duke are solid contrarian options in a fairly open East region. If you have the mental fortitude to fade Alabama and/or Houston, the No. 2 seeds — Arizona and Texas, respectively — are likely your best bet, and you don’t need to get much more contrarian than that in most pools since ‘Bama/Houston will be heavily owned.
Very large (thousands of entrants): Duke has turned the corner after getting fully healthy and making a couple of lineup changes, plus their star freshmen Dereck Lively, Dariq Whitehead, and Tyrese Proctor have rounded into form after slow starts. If you want to shoot for the moon, Memphis is no lock to even advance past Round 1, but they pose an interesting matchup for Purdue in Round 2 given their high-intensity defense. Similarly, Creighton is way under-seeded based on the numbers but could lose in the Round of 64 to a high-octane North Carolina State team. Connecticut, St. Mary’s, and TCU are all under-seeded in the West region of death.
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March 15, 2023 at 02:21AM
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2023 March Madness Bracket Pool Strategy - Establish The Run
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