March Madness pools

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 popularity of this phenomenon is fostered by March Madness pools, or brackets. The tournament bracket can be completed online or printed out and completed by hand whereby the participant predicts the outcome of each game in the tournament. The bracket is to be completed before the tip of the first four games begin. His or her predictions are compared against others in the pool, and whoever has the best prognostication skills wins the contest. Various other bracket games exist including a board game whereby players draft teams.[1][2]

Background

Tournament bids
See also: Bracketology

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.[3] 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.[4]

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.[5] 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.

Timeframe

The tournament takes place over three weekends starting with "Selection Sunday"[6] in mid-March and concluding with the semifinals and championship game (Final Four), usually held on the first weekend of April.

Brackets

Perhaps the biggest key to the tremendous popularity of the tournament is the bracket. 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. Some March Madness contests are free to enter, others require an entry fee. Many businesses utilize pool hosting services to run their pools, allowing them the flexibility to customize the pool rules and display. The board game has its own set of rules for drafting teams and computing scores.[7] Scoring systems usually award increasingly more points for correctly picking winners in later rounds.

Pursuit of the perfect bracket

Filling out a bracket with the winners of each of the 63 games is an incredibly difficult task, and nobody has successfully filled out a perfect bracket. Warren Buffet publicly offered $1 billion for a successful perfect bracket, popularizing the concept.[8] Various approaches have been taken to estimate the chance of predicting a perfect bracket. If games were 50/50 propositions, the chances of a bracket being perfect are 1 in 263, or 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion).[8] Other estimates of the chance of a perfect bracket, accounting for usual patterns of tournament results, have ranged from 1 in 576 quadrillion to 1 in 128 billion.[8][9][10] The longest a bracket has stayed perfect is 49 games in 2019 - encompassing 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.[11]

Popularity

March Madness has become one of the most popular sporting events in the United States.[12][13] Because of the length of the tournament and the number of teams involved it is one of the most popular sporting events in terms of television ratings. One event associated with March Madness is filling out the brackets. It has become extremely common in popular culture, even among non-sports fans; it is estimated that tens of millions of Americans participate in the contest every year. Mainstream media outlets such as ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports or MGM host tournaments online where contestants can enter for free and obtain high valuable cash prizes up to 2 million dollars.[14] 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.[15] There are also many handicappers and pundits which offer advice for winning one's bracket.[16][17]

See also

References
  1. "Net Score Bracket Game". Net Score Bracket Game. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
  2. Siegel, Alan (2013-03-17). "Bored With Brackets? Here Are 11 Alternate Ways to Run an NCAA Pool". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
  3. Explanation of March Madness
  4. Scott, Dylan (2018-03-13). "NCAA basketball's bribery scandal and its March Madness conspiracy theory, explained". Vox. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  5. "Bracketology with Joe Lunardi". ESPN.com. January 12, 2015. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  6. "March Madness Selection Sunday". Rookie Road. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  7. "Net Score Bracket Game". Net Score Bracket Game. Retrieved 2022-09-28.
  8. Szczerba, Robert J. "Bracketology 101: Picking A Perfect Bracket Is Actually Easier Than You Think". Forbes. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
  9. 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.
  10. "A Quantum Leap For Basketball 'Bracketology'". Inside Science. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  11. "The longest an NCAA bracket has ever stayed perfect | NCAA.com". www.ncaa.com. Retrieved 2023-03-18.
  12. Geiling, Natasha (March 20, 2014). "When Did Filling Out A March Madness Bracket Become Popular?". Smithsonian. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  13. Deford, Frank (March 9, 2011). "What makes March Madness so popular? Its knockout nature". Sports Illustrated. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  14. "BetMGM March Madness $2 Milion Bracket challenge". howtobet.com. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  15. "Business lose $14B from workers watching March Madness". NewsNation. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  16. Trotter, Ryan (March 18, 2013). "Geeks Can Win March Madness Pools". Retrieved March 10, 2014.
  17. 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
  • Adams T (2018). Improving Your NCAA Bracket with Statistics. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
  • Feng E (2016). How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool. The Power Rank, Inc.
  • Poundstone W (2014). Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody. Little, Brown and Company.
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