Bracketmania

How to host your own March Madness Pool

March Madness is around the corner, and soon millions of people across the country will be talking about college basketball and filling out brackets.

With some first- and second-round games being held at the BOK Center March 17 and 19, there should be more interest than usual in Tulsa this year, even if it looks like a longshot for any local teams to make the NCAA tournament. Oklahoma State has been playing well lately, so they look like the best bet for any team from around here.

A lot of workplaces have their own pools, where you pay a fee (usually $5 or $10) to fill out the tournament bracket. Whoever gets closest to correctly picking the eventual results wins a portion of, or the entire, pot of money.

If there isn’t already an established pool at your office, or among your friends, here is how to start one of your own.

First of all, if you want to take the easy way out, there are several websites that will do most of the work for you, including the most arduous task of tabulating the results automatically. I’ve used the CBSSports.com and ESPN websites before for this. They have built in brackets for participants to fill out online, they determine the winners and you hardly have to do anything.

But that’s also less fun, and usually you don’t have the ability to customize the format, such as the point system or tiebreaker criteria.

So, to do it yourself, the first order of business is to find a bracket online to print out that leaves enough space for people to write in their picks in each round of the tournament.

Settle on an entry amount—$5 or $10, or if you have a bunch of high-rollers around you, maybe even $20 to increase the overall prize money.

Then a key factor is to determine your points system for calculating the results. How much do you want to weight correct picks from each round of the tournament? The point totals should increase with each successive step towards the national championship.

I’ve seen pools where the first-round games are each worth one point, the second-round is worth two, the next is four, then eight, et cetera. But honestly, I don’t like that because it devalues the first two rounds, where there are a lot of games that are tough to call, and puts too much emphasis on the later rounds.

Personally, I prefer a pool where correct first- and second-round picks are rewarded more. I don’t think a correct third-round game should count four times as much as a first-rounder, so if you have the first-round games go for, say three points, with the second five and the third seven (or 4-6-8), that seems more balanced. My point distribution would be 3-5-7-9, with 12 for a Final Four pick, and 16 for the champion.

The First Four play-in games could be worth one or two points, if you count them at all.

Also, some pools have a tie-breaker or bonus question, asking for a championship game score or total points scored in the Final. If you do that, just have it be worth one extra point and only applicable if the person correctly predicts the winner, or just as a tie-breaker (whoever’s closer) if two people are deadlocked at the top of the standings.

Then decide how to divide the prize money. If you have a large pool, say with 12 or more people, it’s a good idea to reward the top two or three finishers, rather than just giving the entire pot to the overall winner. In my pools, I’ve awarded 50 percent to the winner, 30 percent to second place and 20 percent to third.

Make sure you collect the brackets before the first games start, and of course, the money. If not everyone participating is local, you can also make things more convenient by accepting PayPal or another online currency exchange.

During the tournament, it would be cool to provide updates. “Grading” the brackets can take a little time, but it’s also fun to see who picked who and where everyone stands.

So after the second round, get a bracket in front of you that reflects all the true winners and go through all the participants’ bracket sheets, figuring out how many correct picks each person got and calculating their point totals based on the system you devised. Then provide a standings update to everyone.

Do the same thing after the fourth round, after which the Final Four will be determined, and of course, after the tournament is over.

There you have it. It may be a little extra work—particularly during the sometimes-tedious process of “grading” the first few rounds of brackets—but running your own NCAA tournament pool is definitely a fun way to enhance the experience of one of the most exciting three weeks of the sports calendar.

For more from John, read his article on REVVED Fitness.