Each of the past two years, I've outlined a strategy to maximize your value in your NCAA men's basketball tournament pool. Here's the update for this year's tourney. Much of the explanation comes from the previous version, but all of the numbers are updated.
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Generally, most people's picks in tournament pools look pretty similar. After a while, you start to have consensus. For instance, the millions of users in ESPN's online pool almost all think the top four seeds will win their first game (and they're almost certainly right, as a top seed has never lost to a 16 seed in the first round).
But you can look at each round, and each game, and see the percentage of players who've picked which winner. Call it the wisdom of the crowd, which is pretty darn good. Even with the unpredictability of the tournament, the crowd's consensus picks usually finish in the 80th percentile or so.
That's not good enough to win your pool, though. You need to be looking for teams that the crowd is undervaluing (or overvaluing). That's what we've done in the chart below:
Here's what those numbers mean. They're the difference between the crowd's pick at ESPN, and the statistical predictions of two top college basketball analysts: Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin. Both sets of ratings can be used to calculate a team's expected chance to reach a certain round of the tournament. This year, I've also added Nate Silver's ratings from the New York Times, which use the computer forecasts, but adjust for location, injuries, and other factors.
I've then taken the three ratings and averaged them, then compared them with the ESPN percentages. A positive number means the stats say a team is more likely to win than the crowd thinks; negative means the stats say they're more likely to lose than the crowd thinks.
Games that have more than a 10 percent difference are highlighted — green showing teams that are good bets compared to the crowd and red showing bad bets.
A couple of things jump right out of the data. Kentucky is the consensus favorite in this year's tournament, but the team is wildly over-valued by the market. It has about a 20 percent chance of winning it all, but 32 percent of ESPN entries are picking the Wildcats. If you want to stand out in your pool, you might not want to.
In the years I've been doing this, there's never been a top team as undervalued by the crowd as Ohio State is this season. The stats say the Buckeyes have close to a 50 percent chance to make it to the Final Four, while only 22 percent of ESPN users pick them to get there. Another top four seed not getting love from the crowd is the Wisconsin Badgers, who seem to be undervalued every year.
A couple of upset specials from a par of 14 seeds: Belmont and South Dakota State. Stats geeks think both teams have a nearly 40 percent chance to win their first round games, but only 13 percent of ESPN users have picked Belmont while just 3.8 percent have picked South Dakota State. Don't be surprised if one of these teams pulls off a shocker.
This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Stick with the crowd and you probably won't win, although you likely won't finish last. But since most pools only pay for the top few slots, you might as well go for it, right?
Want to play with all the numbers yourself? The complete Google Docs spreadsheet is available for your tinkering pleasure.
