Each of the past three 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 prediction of top college basketball analyst Ken Pomeroy. (In past years, I've included other projections from Jeff Sagarin, as well as Nate Silver. They're not included this year – Sagarin's because complete numbers aren't available, and Silver's because they're derived from a similar formula.)
I've compared Pomeroy's projections 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. Florida is wildly under-valued by the crowd. In Pomeroy's numbers, the Gators are actually the favorite to win the title with a 1-in-5 chance of winning, while only 2.8 percent of ESPN users have picked them to go all the way. That's a huge value bet.
There are a couple of strong first round upset picks: Bucknell, Akron, and Davidson are all undervalued by more than 20 percent by the crowd. Also, Memphis is wildly overvalued – the Tigers are a slight underdog to advance out of the first round, but 87 percent of ESPN users have picked them to make it through.
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.
