NCAA Bracket: DFS-Based Strategies To Win Your Pool

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from TeamRankings.com, a site that has provided data-driven bracket tools and analysis since 2004. They also offer premium bracket picks.

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It’s officially March Madness, the one week of the year when all the grinders of the world should have more than DFS on their minds.

Why? Because NCAA bracket pools are fantastic opportunities to apply some of the fundamental principles of DFS strategy to reap impressive expected returns.

Unlike a lot of DFS tourneys these days, March Madness bracket contests are so popular with the general public that many of them are stocked with proverbial ‘fish’ — low skilled players making clearly suboptimal picks.

Not to mention that you’re picking teams in your bracket, not players, so you don’t need to be a college basketball expert to get a big edge. Access to the right numbers and tools will get you there.

Here at TeamRankings.com, we may not be DFS pros, but we’ve built the most sophisticated tools to maximize your edge in bracket contests.

Backed by nearly 15 years of research, here are strategies DFS players use every day that will give you a big leg up in your 2018 bracket contest.

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1. Use Objective Predictions

There are over 4,000 games in a single college basketball season. To develop an intimate knowledge of every NCAA tournament team, a human brain would need to assimilate and process data from most (if not all) of those games.

It’s simply not possible. As a result, everyone from casual fans to the so-called “expert” college basketball commentators on TV form biased opinions on teams based on imperfect data. And with 68 teams playing (and not known for sure until this past Sunday), it’s a lot harder for your opponents to get an edge just by watching more games than you.

Recency bias also comes into play, since a lot of people (including some of the folks providing analysis for the big networks) don’t really start tuning into college basketball until the conference tournaments start. Then they get overly impressed by a team like Michigan, a surprise conference tourney winner, even though there’s not much evidence that teams who get hot at the end of the regular season outperform expectations in the NCAA tournament.

In a season-long picking contest, only a (mostly lucky) handful of humans would pick college basketball winners more often than sophisticated computer models or projections implied by the betting markets. So having good models and a keen understanding of betting market expectations is the foundation of a winning bracket strategy.

Our approach is to use an ensemble of models’ approach to make bracket picks. We evaluate team ratings and projections from multiple algorithmic models and top ratings systems, along with the latest Vegas odds.

To squeeze out any additional edge we can, we also review every team’s lineup history and injury status to make sure our ratings more accurately represent the team/lineups that actually will be playing in the NCAA tournament.

2. Understand The Scoring System

Just like in DFS, a bracket pool’s scoring system can make a huge difference in the optimal strategy to win. You shouldn’t even start to think about making any specific picks until you’ve fully analyzed the implications of how your pool assigns points.

The structure of the most popular 1-2-4-8-16-32 bracket pool scoring system, for instance, places a very high importance on getting your late-round picks correct. When the total points available to be won in each tournament round is the same (32), it means getting just one of your NCAA finalist picks right is worth the same as getting a whopping 16 first round games right.

If your pool uses this scoring system, focus the vast majority of your analysis time on your Final Four and beyond (maybe your Elite 8 and beyond in smaller pools), because pulling your hair out over first round picks is almost certainly going to be a waste of time, and time is short when brackets are due on Thursday.

However, if your pool’s scoring system is flatter (say 1-2-3-4-5-6 points by round), or if it has upset bonuses, it’s a completely different story.

In those types of bracket pools, early round games are much more likely to have a big impact in determining the pool winner, so your bracket picks in those rounds especially should look much different. In fact, our research shows that most players in upset bonus pools aren’t nearly as aggressive as they should be when it comes to making risky picks. Taking a double-digit seed to the Elite 8 could very well be worth it from an EV standpoint.

The math behind optimizing your bracket for your particular scoring system is incredibly complex, though. Just like DFS has lineup optimizers to crunch all the numbers, we’ve developed bracket pick optimization algorithms that take into account both your pool’s round-by-round scoring system and upset bonus structure.

In addition to identifying the best bracket for your pool, our optimizer also generates alternate brackets meant to be played as a multi-entry portfolio strategy in a single pool. These brackets diversify risk by making key bets on different teams.

3. Adjust Your Pick Strategy For Pool Size

We don’t have to explain to grinders why a great lineup for a huge GPP is probably a terrible lineup for a small double-up, and the exact same logic applies to bracket pools.

In bracket pools, there is no prize for getting a certain number of picks right. You win your pool if and only if you score more points than everyone else. And the bigger your pool, the harder it is to score more points than everyone else.

When you’re competing against hundreds or thousands of opponents in a bracket pool, the odds are high that a few of your enemies are going to get really lucky and finish with great scores, even if they’re not particularly skilled players. This is just the phenomenon of randomness doing its thing, and some degree of it will occur every year.

Sometimes, as we all know, one of the lucky ones is a “clueless about college basketball and had their 5-year old make their picks” type. It happens, and it’s going to keep happening.

Our research shows that in large bracket pools with standard scoring, it’s typically better to make some highly contrarian bets, and hope that it’s somewhat of a crazy year in terms of how the tournament plays out. That could mean making a highly undervalued champion pick, or several slightly less aggressive, but still significant, value bets across the later rounds.

The rationale here is that if your key picks in a big pool are “safer” ones, they’re probably also going to be popular picks among your competition. Even if many of those picks do end up playing out — which is a lot less likely than most people think — you’re still going to be competing in a “mini-pool” against a bunch of opponents who also picked those teams. Even in a good luck year, you could taste the agony of finishing near the top but still not winning.

As you may have guessed, smaller bracket pools call for a more conservative strategy. In fact, you can usually get a pretty solid edge in small pools by simply assuming that most of your opponents are likely to get much too risky with their picks, and letting them shoot themselves in the foot.

Pool size plays a pivotal role in the computer simulations of bracket contests that we run day and night starting Selection Sunday. For 1,000 person bracket pools, for instance, we first use public picking trends data to create 999 randomized opponent brackets that represent your competition’s likely picks.

Then, we test millions of possible bracket pick combinations until we identify the bracket that has the best chance to beat all of them — including the lucky ones.

Wrapping It Up

Picking the bracket that gives you the best chance to win your NCAA pool is a daunting task, especially with 67 individual pick decisions to make. Still, DFS players are well familiar with the tools and strategies needed to win more often.

If you’d rather outsource the heavy lifting to the bracket pros this year, check out our premium brackets and analysis tools (or read more about them in this month’s WIRED).

NCAA Bracket Picks from TeamRankings.com

Once you’ve settled on your strategy, don’t forget to join the RotoGrinders March Madness bracket to put your skills to work!

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