March Madness pools

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March Madness pools are a form of sports betting based on the annual NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament each spring in the United States. 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. Various scoring systems exist to award points for correct predictions, and various alternative games related to March Madness predictions exist. [1] Tens of millions of brackets are filled out each year. Due to the size of the tournament and its proclivity for upsets, a perfect bracket has never been achieved.

Contents

Background

Tournament bids

The tournament field comprises 68 teams who play NCAA Division I college basketball. Among the field, 32 automatic bids are given to winners of each conference, usually via a season-ending conference tournament. [2] The other 36 teams receive at-large bids from a selection committee. The process of selecting at-large bids involves subjective judgment of teams' performance over the course of the season, and can be controversial. [3]

Seeds

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. [4] 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. The field plays a 6-round single-elimination tournament, in which a single loss ends a team's chances of becoming champions.[ citation needed ]

Timeframe

The tournament takes place over three weekends starting with "Selection Sunday" [5] in mid-March and concluding with the semifinals and championship game (Final Four), usually held on the first weekend of April.

Brackets

The March Madness bracket is the visual representation of all the teams in the tournament and the path they have to follow to the Final Four and the championship game. There are pools or private gambling-related contests in which participants predict the outcome of each tournament game, filling out a complete tournament bracket in the process. Various scoring systems exist to award participants for correctly predicting the results of March Madness games. Some pools or contests are free to enter, while others require an entry fee.

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. [6] 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. [6] [7] [8] 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. Of note, the 2019 tournament was marked by relatively few upsets. [9]

Popularity

March Madness is one of the most popular sporting events in the United States. [10] [11] In 2023, Sports Illustrated reported that an estimated 60 to 100 million brackets are filled out each year. [12] There are numerous prizes given by companies for anyone who can predict every game in the bracket, thereby increasing interest in the practice. Warren Buffett has publicly offered $1 billion for a perfect bracket. [6] Mainstream media outlets such as ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, and MGM host free-entry tournaments online where contestants can obtain cash prizes up to $2 million. [13] Employers have also noticed a change in the behavior of employees during this time: they have seen an increase in the number of sick days used, extended lunch breaks and even the rescheduling of conference calls to allow for more tournament watching. [14] Many handicappers and pundits offer advice for winning one's bracket pool. [15] [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Calcutta auction</span> Form of bet

A Calcutta auction is an open auction held in conjunction with a golf tournament, horse race or similar contest with multiple entrants. It is popular in backgammon, the Melbourne Cup, and college basketball pools during March Madness. Culcutta auction is a sequential auction, where the bidding for each contestant begins in random order, with only one contestant being bid upon at any time. Accordingly, participants bid among themselves to "buy" each of the contestants, with each contestant being assigned to the highest bidder. The contestant will then pay out to the owner a predetermined proportion of the pool depending on how it performs in the tournament.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> United States top collegiate-level basketball tournament

The NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, branded as March Madness, is a single-elimination tournament played in the United States to determine the men's college basketball national champion of the Division I level in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Played mostly during March, the tournament consists of 68 teams and was first conducted in 1939. Known for its upsets of favored teams, it has become one of the biggest annual sporting events in the US.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament</span> Annual college basketball tournament for women

The NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament, sometimes referred to as Women's March Madness, is a single-elimination tournament played each spring in the United States, currently featuring 68 women's college basketball teams from the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), to determine the national championship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Invitation Tournament</span> Collegiate basketball tournament

The National Invitation Tournament (NIT) is an annual men's college basketball tournament operated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The tournament is played at regional sites with its Final Four played at Madison Square Garden (MSG) in New York City up until 2022. Starting in 2023, the NIT Final Four began following the format of the NCAA Tournament by having its Final Four at different venues each season. First held in 1938, the NIT was once considered the most prestigious post-season showcase for college basketball before its status was superseded in the mid-1950s by the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bracket (tournament)</span> Diagram of a tournament

A bracket or tournament bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament. Different knockout tournament formats have different brackets; the simplest and most common is that of the single-elimination tournament. The name "bracket" is American English, derived from the resemblance of the links in the tree diagram to the bracket punctuation symbol ] or [. The closest British term is draw, although this implies an element of chance, whereas some brackets are determined entirely by seeding.

Bracketology is the process of predicting the field of college basketball participants in the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, named as such because it is commonly used to fill in tournament brackets for the postseason. It incorporates some method of predicting the metrics the NCAA Selection Committee will use in order to determine at-large teams to complete the field of 68 teams, and, to seed the field by ranking all teams from first through sixty-eighth. Bracketology also encompasses the process of predicting the winners of each of the brackets. In recent years the concept of bracketology has been applied to areas other than basketball.

The selection process for college basketball's NCAA Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments determine which teams will enter the tournaments and their seedings and matchups in the knockout bracket. Currently, thirty-two (32) teams gain automatic entry through winning their conference's championship. The remaining teams rely on the selection committee to award them an at-large bid in the tournament. The selection process primarily takes place on Selection Sunday and the days leading up to it. Selection Sunday is also when the men's brackets and seeds are released to the public. Beginning in 2022, the women's championship brackets and seeds are also announced on Sunday. Prior to the expansion of the bracket from 64 to 68 teams the women's championship brackets and seeds were announced one day later, on Selection Monday.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women's National Invitation Tournament</span> Postseason womens college basketball tournament

The Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) is a women's national college basketball tournament with a preseason and postseason version played every year. It is operated in a similar fashion to the men's college National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and NIT Season Tip-Off. Unlike the NIT, the women's tournament is not run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), but is an independent tournament. Triple Crown Sports, a company based in Fort Collins, Colorado that specializes in the promotion of amateur sporting events, created the WNIT in 1994 as a preseason counterpart to the then-current National Women's Invitational Tournament (NWIT). After the NWIT folded in 1996, Triple Crown Sports resurrected the postseason version in 1998 under the NWIT name, but changed the following season to the current name.

A betting pool, syndicate, sports lottery, sweep, or office pool if done at work, is a form of gambling, specifically a variant of parimutuel betting influenced by lotteries, where gamblers pay a fixed price into a pool, and then make a selection on an outcome, usually related to sport. In an informal game, the vig is usually quite small or non-existent. The pool is evenly divided between those that have made the correct selection. There are no odds involved; each winner's payoff depends simply on the number of gamblers and the number of winners.

Bracket buster, as a generic phrase, refers to an American college basketball team, usually from a so-called mid-major school, which upsets a highly ranked team in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament and to a lesser extent, the NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament.

Joseph Lunardi is an American college basketball analyst for ESPN.

<i>NCAA March Madness</i> (TV program) Broadcasts of the NCAA mens basketball tournament by CBS Sports and TNT Sports

NCAA March Madness is the branding used for coverage of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament that is jointly produced by CBS Sports, the sports division of the CBS television network, and TNT Sports, the national sports division of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in the United States. Through the agreement between CBS and WBD, which began with the 2011 tournament, games are televised on CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV. CBS Sports Network has re-aired games from all networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2016 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> Edition of USA college basketball tournament

The 2016 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament involved 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament to determine the men's National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I college basketball national champion for the 2015–16 season. The 78th edition of the Tournament began on March 15, 2016, and concluded with the championship game on April 4, at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. This was the first NCAA tournament to adopt the NCAA March Madness branding, including fully-branded courts at each of the tournament venues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2018 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> Edition of USA college basketball tournament

The 2018 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament was a single-elimination tournament of 68 teams to determine the men's National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I college basketball national champion for the 2017–18 season. The 80th annual edition of the tournament began on March 13, 2018, and concluded with the championship game on April 2, at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2019 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> Edition of USA college basketball tournament

The 2019 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament involved 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament to determine the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's basketball national champion for the 2018–19 season. The 81st annual edition of the tournament began on March 19, 2019, and concluded with the championship game on April 8, at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, between the Texas Tech Red Raiders and the Virginia Cavaliers, with Virginia winning 85–77 in overtime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2020 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> Edition of USA college basketball tournament

The 2020 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament was a planned single-elimination tournament of 68 teams to determine the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's college basketball national champion for the 2019–20 season. The 82nd edition of the tournament would have begun on March 17, 2020, and concluded with the championship game on April 6 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2021 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> 2021 edition of NCAA Division 1 Mens college basketball tournament

The 2021 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament was a single-elimination tournament of 68 teams to determine the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's college basketball national champion for the 2020–21 season. The 82nd edition of the tournament began play on March 18, 2021, in sites around the state of Indiana, and concluded with the championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on April 5, with the Baylor Bears defeating the previously undefeated Gonzaga Bulldogs 86–70 to earn the team's first ever title.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2022 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> Edition of USA college basketball tournament

The 2022 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament involved 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament that determined the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's college basketball national champion for the 2021–22 season. The 83rd annual edition of the tournament began on March 15, 2022, and concluded with the championship game on April 4 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, with the Kansas Jayhawks defeating the North Carolina Tar Heels, 72–69, overcoming a 16-point first-half deficit, to claim the school's fourth national title.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2023 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament</span> American college basketball tournament

The 2023 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament involved 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament that determined the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's basketball national champion for the 2022–23 season. The 84th annual edition of the tournament began on March 14, 2023, and concluded with the UConn Huskies defeating the San Diego State Aztecs, 76–59 in the championship game on April 3 at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas.

The 2021 Pac-12 Conference men's basketball tournament was a postseason men's basketball tournament for the Pac-12 Conference, which was played March 10–13, 2021, at T-Mobile Arena on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. The winner was Oregon State, which was the first for the Beavers in the history of the tournament. They received the conference's automatic bid to the 2021 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament. The 2020 Tournament had been cancelled after the first round due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 tournament was played, but with only family of student-athletes as spectators in attendance.

References

  1. Siegel, Alan (2013-03-17). "Bored With Brackets? Here Are 11 Alternate Ways to Run an NCAA Pool". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
  2. Explanation of March Madness
  3. Scott, Dylan (2018-03-13). "NCAA basketball's bribery scandal and its March Madness conspiracy theory, explained". Vox. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  4. "Bracketology with Joe Lunardi". ESPN.com . January 12, 2015. Archived from the original on February 22, 2010. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  5. "March Madness Selection Sunday". Rookie Road. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  6. 1 2 3 Szczerba, Robert J. "Bracketology 101: Picking A Perfect Bracket Is Actually Easier Than You Think". Forbes. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
  7. Kiersz, Andy. "The odds of getting a perfect NCAA bracket are way better than 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808". Business Insider. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  8. "A Quantum Leap For Basketball 'Bracketology'". Inside Science. 20 March 2013. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  9. "The longest an NCAA bracket has ever stayed perfect | NCAA.com". www.ncaa.com. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  10. Geiling, Natasha (March 20, 2014). "When Did Filling Out A March Madness Bracket Become Popular?". Smithsonian . Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  11. Deford, Frank (March 9, 2011). "What makes March Madness so popular? Its knockout nature". Sports Illustrated . Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  12. Williams, Madison (March 12, 2023). "Has Anyone Ever Had a Perfect March Madness Bracket?". Sports Illustrated. Retrieved March 22, 2024.
  13. "BetMGM March Madness $2 Milion Bracket challenge". howtobet.com. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  14. "Business lose $14B from workers watching March Madness". NewsNation . Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  15. Trotter, Ryan (March 18, 2013). "Geeks Can Win March Madness Pools" . Retrieved March 10, 2014.
  16. Boudway, Ira (March 18, 2013). "How to Win Your March Madness Pool". Business Week . Archived from the original on March 21, 2013. Retrieved July 21, 2013.

Further reading