To be officially entered into the pool, be sure to create a bracket or add a bracket on the pool’s page by selecting from the options in the select menu (after March 17th). After saving your tournament, you can invite players or teams to view the online tournament bracket, or submit their own bracket. You manage the master bracket the your player's brackets are scored against. Configure specific points earned for correct picks in each round. You can even configure points for underdog wins.

1. Pool Play Bracket Generator
2. Pool Play Brackets Printable
3. 6 Team Pool Play Format

You want to win your March Madness pool. The money is nice, but the bragging rights are even better.

A short introduction to the fundamentals of pool (pocket billiards).

However, it seems so difficult to win your pool. You don’t have the time to do the hours of research required to study all teams.

I have a better way for you.

My book How to win your NCAA tournament pool combines analytics and strategy to maximize your chances of winning. Analytics gives you an edge over others in predicting winners. Strategy lets you exploit the biases of others in picking the best bracket.

This is the book for:

• People who don’t think March Madness can be predicted. You’ll be surprised how often analytics can predict the winner of tourney games, even before it starts. See the Introduction Chapter.
• People who think you should just pick the team with the highest win probability as champion. You need think contrarian. See Chapter 3.
• People who don’t have 10 hours to research their bracket. A simple 3 step process helps you make the most important decision for your bracket.
• People who love March Madness. This book recounts the excitement of past tourneys through an optimal bracket.

How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool, revised and updated for 2016, is the first book that explains how to fill out your bracket based on pool size. This is the only genuine way to maximize your odds of winning.

I won two pools, one of them had 100 entries, and the other had 20 entries. It felt great winning the pool, bragging rights in my office were almost better than the money won!

— Ryan Peters, Omaha, Nebraska, 2015.

To get the professionally edited ebook from the Amazon Kindle Store, click here.

About the author

Hi, my name is Ed Feng. As a college basketball junkie in grad school, I wrote code to use Ken Pomeroy’s numbers to fill out my bracket. After that, people stopped inviting me into their pools.

Years later, I developed a ranking algorithm for sports teams based on my research in the mathematics of randomness. This led to The Power Rank, my site devoted to better predictions through analytics.

March Madness has played a huge role in my sports analytics journey from the beginning. In 2012, SB Nation made a gorgeous video on my tourney analytics and data visualizations.

In addition, here’s an unsolicited email about my rankings and predictions.

You’ll be glad to know that I have been and continue to be in first place in my family bracket, and yesterday the message board was abuzz with talk of my first 8 picks being perfect. My police officer cousin threatened to subpoena my IP address to make sure I had picked before the games started. I explained my picks and posted a link to The Power Rank website, which prompted my uncle to cry foul about my research methods!

— Tom Kellogg, Madison, WI.

Using your NCAAB rankings I placed second in an 800 man contest.

— Steve Bell, Canton, Georgia, 2016.

Pool Play Bracket Generator

A study by FiveThirtyEight.com found my 2015 tournament predictions to be the most accurate.

As a data scientist and writer, I contribute regular columns to Bleacher Report and the Detroit News. My content has also appeared on Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, and Grantland.

How to win your NCAA tournament pool

My research reveals the following lessons on filling out your bracket.

• Can tournament games be predicted at all? You might be surprised how often one particular team wins, and why this matters in small pools. See Chapter 1.
• How to pick the right pool. You might as well light your entry fee on fire if you enter the wrong pool. See Chapter 2.
• The contrarian approach to winning a medium sized pool that will make sense to no one but you. This is the key to avoiding the luck of others in your pool. See Chapter 3.
• The little secret about which teams to not pick as champion. It has to do with college basketball’s ultimate weapon. See Chapter 5.
• Your true odds of winning a pool based on its size. My Monte Carlo simulations give you the best possible estimates.

Here’s how one reader won his pool in 2015.

I played 2 contrarians (Arizona & Duke) in a middle size pool. I used your advice in picking the games (rather than waste time looking for sleepers etc.). Going into tonight, I would take 1st with a Duke win or take 3rd with a loss.

–Randy Athay, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, 2015.

Get my predictive analytics

There is no guarantee that you’ll win your pool. Even with the best strategy, luck can slap you in the face. Grandma, who doesn’t know the difference between John Calipari and Nick Saban, picks every sleeper team that makes the Sweet 16 and wins the pool.

However, analytics can greatly reduce the role of luck in your pool results. In about 10,000 words and 7 visuals, this book shows you the best strategy based on pool size. In addition, I provide an honest look at your chances of winning a pool.

Ed Feng’s book isn’t just fun, but an indispensible guide to having a fighting chance to win your pool this year. If you haven’t read Ed’s analysis, you are starting well behind the competition.

— Craig Ross, author of The Obscene Diaries of a Michigan Fan and The Search for the Unified Field Theory (Football Version).

There are two ways to get my March Madness book.

Get the audiobook on how to win your pool

The audiobook How to win your NCAA tournament pool is read by the author and professionally edited. It contains over 55 minutes of content.

To purchase the audiobook package for $9.99, click on “Buy the audiobook package How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool.”

Get the ebook on how to win your pool

The professionally edited ebook is available for $2.99 on the Amazon Kindle Store.

If you have any questions, click here.

Pool Play Brackets Printable

Get a free sample of the book

Still unsure? You can read the Introduction chapter of the book by signing up for my email newsletter.

To sign up for this free service, enter your best email and click on “Sign up now!”

A bracket or tournament bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament. Different knockout tournament formats have different brackets; the simplest and most common is that of the single-elimination tournament. The name 'bracket' is American English, derived from the resemblance of the links in the tree diagram to the bracket punctuation symbol ] or [ (called a 'square bracket' in British English). The closest British term is draw, although this implies an element of chance, whereas some brackets are determined entirely by seeding.

In some tournaments, the full bracket is determined before the first match. In such cases, fans may enjoy trying to predict the winners of the initial round and of the consequent later matchups. This is called 'bracketology', particularly in relation to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship. This prediction is not possible in tournaments, such as the FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League knockout phase, in which the pairings for a later round might not be made until after the previous round has been played (UEFA Champions League makes its ultimate bracket draw at the quarterfinal stage ^[1]).

Usage in North America[edit]

Brackets are commonly found in major North American professional sports leagues and in U.S. college sports. Often, at the end of the regular season, the league holds a post-season tournament (most commonly called a playoff) to determine which team is the best out of all of the teams in the league. This is done because often in American professional sports there are at least two different conferences, and teams mostly play other teams in their own conference. Examples of this are the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference in the NFL, the American League and the National League in Major League Baseball, and the EasternConference and the WesternConference in the NBA or NHL.

When there are only two different conferences, there are two sides of the bracket. One conference is on one side, while the other is on the opposite side. Each side is organized according to a team's seeding; higher-seeded teams are matched against lower-seeded teams. Teams that qualify for the post-season tournament only compete against teams in their own conference, until only one team from each conference remains. These two teams, called the conference champions, play each other to determine the best in the league. Other leagues, like the NHL, have two conferences, each of which is divided into divisions, usually by region. In the post-season tournament, only the teams with the best records qualify, except the division winner (and also #2 and #3 in the division in the NHL) having an automatic entry into the tournament.

Some North American professional post-season tournaments are single-elimination format. If a bye is required, the top seeded teams usually get the bye. There is usually no third place match to separate the third and fourth place teams.

The concept is even more visible in college sports, most notably in reference to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship, in which millions of casual and serious fans 'fill out brackets'—predict the winners of each game in the tournament—in both formal contests, sponsored by various corporations, and informal betting pools among friends or colleagues. The brackets are much larger than those in North American professional leagues—while no more than 16 teams qualify for the postseason in any major North American league (this is the case in the NBA and NHL), 68 teams (out of over 350) advance to the NCAA men's tournament, with most bracket contests involving 64 of these teams.

Examples[edit]

The diagrams for formats other than single-elimination are more complex than a simple tree.

• The double-elimination bracket from the 2004 national Science Bowl [Super Ball]

• A triple-elimination tournament.

• Australian Football League finals incorporating a bye for the highest two seeded, first round winners.

• The Page playoff system used in various T20 cricket leagues.

Types of brackets[edit]

6 Team Pool Play Format

Single Elimination

Teams play 'Pool Play' games in order to be 'seeded' for the Brackets. Once in the brackets, teams play. Winners advance within the brackets to the right, whereas losers are eliminated in 'Single Elimination'

Double Elimination

Once again, teams play pool play games to gain their 'seeding' going into the brackets. Each team plays their first games. Winners advance to play the winners. Losers play a consolation round.

Versions of advancement[edit]

March Madness Seeding (Best v Worst in a division)

Divisions are broken into pools (e.g., North, South, East, West) and within each pool teams are ranked. The top seed plays the worst seed, the second best seed plays the 2nd worst seed within the pool, etc., until all teams play their first round. If the pool has an odd (not divisible by 2) number of teams, there will be a 'play in' game of the worst vs the 2nd worst team. Such a seeding system produces a wide variety of matches, but requires many games to determine an outcome.

• Assuming an even number of pools (e.g., pool A, B, C, and D), each of the #1 ranked team based upon their pool play results play an initial game (A1 vs B1, C1 vs D1). Winners go to the championship. Losers play for 3rd and 4th place.
• Assuming an odd pools number of pools (e.g., pool A, B, and C), Seed 1 from Pool A (A1) plays seed 1 from Pool B (B1). C1 plays the 'Wildcard' from the second best finishers from within all 3 pools based upon the ranking criteria.
• All #2, #3, etc., ranked teams play in 'Consolation Rounds' to determine their ranked order

References[edit]

1. ^'UEFA Champions League quarter-final and semi-final draws'. UEFA.com. Retrieved 2 January 2021.