Now that March Madness 2023 has arrived, get ready to hear a lot of terrible strategy advice for making NCAA Tournament bracket picks. If there's one thing we've learned over 15-plus years of bracket strategy research, it's that almost no one — including the most respected names in the college basketball media — can be trusted to dispense reliably good advice for how to pick a bracket.
After analyzing the public's performance in past NCAA bracket contests and running millions of computer simulations of bracket pools, we know what the data says about winning bracket pool strategy. In this article, we'll review four key principles for making bracket picks that give you the best chance to win your March Madness bracket contest this year.
Editor's Note: This is a guest post from PoolGenius, whose subscribers have won over $1.8 million in bracket pool prizes using their data-driven bracket picks. They also provide tools for NCAA Survivor pools and Calcutta auctions, as well as NCAA tournament betting picks.
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March Madness Bracket Strategy: How to win your NCAA Tournament pool
Strategy 1: Anticipate how your opponents will pick their brackets in 2023
You don’t win a prize in bracket pools by scoring an arbitrary number of points. It all depends on how much chaos happens in any given year. In years when the highest seeds all make deep runs, you may need to get multiple Final Four picks to compete for a prize. In upset-heavy tournaments, though, a single correct Final Four pick might be enough to win your pool.
It's impossible to predict exactly how the 2023 NCAA tournament will play out. No matter what happens, though, the only way to win your bracket pool this year is if you finish with a higher score than all of your opponents. By definition, you can only get a higher score than someone else if you get a pick right that they get wrong. (It helps the most if that pick is worth a lot of points.)
This dynamic has big implications for bracket strategy because it means that the picks your opponents may influence your odds to win your pool. If you end up picking the same teams in your bracket as everyone else, it's going to be a lot harder to separate yourself from the pack. You should never fill out your bracket without considering the best opportunities to zig where you expect most of your opponents to zag.
Avoiding the most popular bracket picks can pay off
For example, if you are in a bracket pool full of UCLA grads, you should assume that UCLA will be a very popular pick. As a result, you should immediately be thinking about how to construct a sound bracket strategy that doesn't feature UCLA as a key pick.
In many cases, it won't even matter if you think UCLA is a top team with a solid chance to make a deep run. If half your pool is picking them to do that, the math is almost certainly not going to support following the crowd.
You should scan national bracket-picking trends data published by major bracket contest sites like ESPN and Yahoo to gain a general understanding of the teams on which the public is heavily concentrated.
Craft a 2023 bracket strategy around value picks
You're looking to identify teams that have a solid chance to win the tourney (or at least make a deep run) that are also being underrated by the public. To do this, you'll need an objective and trustworthy source of tournament predictions, such as betting odds or our algorithmic projections, that you can compare to public picking trends.
For example, if a team has a 15-percent chance to win the tournament but just seven percent of the public is picking them as champion, you've found yourself an unpopular team that deserves your consideration.
Still, there are limits to this logic. Should you avoid picking every overrated team? No. Very popular picks are usually popular for a good reason. They are strong teams, and having lots of strong teams lose early in your bracket is usually too risky of a strategy. However, in many pools, making an educated gamble on one or two underrated (yet solid) teams to make a deeper run than expected can significantly help your cause.
You can see all this data on PoolGenius.
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Strategy 2: Don't pick too many upsets
Picking too many upsets is the poison that kills many brackets. We know, it’s March Madness, and we all fondly remember the past Cinderella stories. Everyone dreams of nailing that title run to the championship game, like No. 8 North Carolina had last year.
However, hindsight is 20/20. Noting that a long-shot team (say, a No. 5 seed or worse) makes the Final Four fairly often is one thing. Correctly predicting the specific long-shot to make the Final Four is an entirely different beast.
Your odds of doing it aren't good, and the stakes are high. If a popular pick makes the Final Four instead of your long-shot pick, then you're going to give up a lot of points to your opponents.
First-round upset picks: High risk, low reward
One of the biggest reasons that our algorithmic bracket picks consistently outperform the public is because many bracket pool players get too risky with their picks in the earlier rounds. When getting late-round picks correct is worth far more points in most bracket pool scoring systems, having a highly seeded team lose early can torpedo your odds.
Don’t just take our word for it, though. In 2009, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology published a study about NCAA tournament predictions. The professors that studied picks from the public came to a similar conclusion: Simply picking the higher-seeded team in every matchup would have outscored the national average bracket score on ESPN.
Thankfully, there are more effective pick strategies than just picking the higher-seeded team, but you get the point. Plenty of evidence refutes the narrative that you need to pick a bunch of upsets and get them right to do well in your NCAA pool. You need to find the optimal balance of risk and value in your bracket, which is exactly what our optimized 2023 bracket picks do.
Strategy 3: Adapt for your pool size
The advice to not make too many upset picks applies to the majority of bracket pools. It's a wise strategy to follow in pools that use the most common scoring format (1-2-4-8-16-32 points per correct pick, by round) and have fewer than 100 or so entries.
However, if you're in a much larger NCAA pool or one that uses a non-traditional scoring system such as upset pick bonuses, the optimal pick strategy can change in a big way. The larger your pool, the more risk you typically need to take with your picks to maximize your chances of winning. Let’s examine why.
In a small pool (say 20 entries or less), there might only be a few other brackets with the same championship pick as you. As a result, if you get your championship pick correct and have followed a more conservative pick strategy in the early rounds, you'll have a great shot to win the pool. The odds are low that one of your opponents will get both the champion pick right and outperform you in the earlier rounds.
Strategy for large bracket pools changes
When you’re competing against 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 people, the scenario is much different. In big pools, the odds are much higher that one or a few entries will nail both the NCAA champion pick and some crazy upset picks in the earlier rounds (such as a 7-seed to the Final Four because it was their alma mater), just by dumb luck.
In the worst case, if a popular champion pick wins the tournament, it's going to be extremely difficult to outscore every one of the hundreds of entries in a big pool that picked them.
As a result, increasing your odds to win a big pool often requires taking some significant risks, such as picking a very unpopular 4-seed to win the entire tournament. The odds of that happening are also low, but on balance, our data-driven bracket research has shown that it's often a smarter bet than picking a more popular champion.
If your unpopular pick does win, even in a big pool, there will likely only be a few other people in position to win the pool along with you.
Strategy 4: Adapt for your pool’s scoring system
The most common bracket pool scoring system awards 1-2-4-8-16-32 points per correct pick, per round. However, many scoring rule variations exist, and non-standard scoring systems can call for a much different pick strategy.
For example, if you're in a pool that awards points based on the difference in seed number between the winning and losing team, you will score eight points for picking a 12-seed to beat a 5-seed in the First Round compared to scoring only one point for picking the 5-seed to win.
As it turns out, most 12-seeds have win odds much greater than 12.5 percent (1 divided by 8) and are therefore good values to pick in this scoring system from an expected-points-gained perspective. That's often not the case in the traditional scoring system.
In some pools, scoring is based on the round number multiplied by the seed number. In that kind of pool, correctly picking a 10-seed to make the Sweet 16 yields a whopping 30 points while correctly picking a 1-seed to win the national title gets you only 21 points in comparison!
That's why it's so important to take the time to understand your pool's rules. While most players pick too many upsets in the standard bracket pool scoring system, they often don't pick enough upsets in pools with heavy upset bonuses. If you're playing it right, your friends should probably make fun of your bracket for standard scoring systems for being too conservative and express shock and ridicule when they see how crazy your upset-pool bracket looks.
The best bracket strategy & picks for your pool
Winning an NCAA bracket pool isn't easy. No matter how strategic your picks are, it's always going to take some luck. But by keeping these four bracket strategy tips in mind, you'll avoid the most common pitfalls and traps that doom the chances of uninformed bracket pickers. As we like to say, the smarter your strategy is, the less luck you need to win.
Finally, if you'd prefer to outsource all of the data collection and number crunching that it takes to implement these strategies in your 2023 brackets, we can help. Our bracket optimizer asks you a few simple questions about your pool before generating customized brackets that give you the best chance to win.
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It only takes minutes, and you don't need to know any math or anything about college basketball to reap the benefits. And most importantly, it works. Our subscribers have won over $1.8 million in bracket pool prizes, and every year over half of them win a prize in at least one March Madness bracket contest.
We even have tools for NCAA survivor pools and Calcutta auctions, plus data-driven betting picks for the 2023 tournament.
