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We’ve all been there before.
You spend hours researching a particular No. 13 seed vs No. 4 seed matchup in the first round of March Madness. You love the matchup for the No. 13 seed. You’re the only person in your entire pool who picks the team. You then watch with glee as the team pulls away for a win, giving you an advantage over everyone else. But it was a first-round game, and you were rewarded with one point for correctly picking a No. 13 seed.
Then the No. 8 seed you picked to beat a No. 9 seed loses by a bucket, and your friends have all caught up to you.
It doesn’t seem like justice. You should get more credit for taking a chance no one else takes.
Now you do.
Enter the Opta Analyst Predictor Bracket. The bigger the upset, the higher the score. But it’s not based on seeding. It’s based on data-driven win probability and the likelihood of each team advancing to each round based on their potential matchups.
Here’s how it works: Our supercomputer runs simulations of the 2025 NCAA tournament to determine how likely it is that a particular team will reach a particular round. We’re doing this for the men’s and women’s tournaments. If you pick a team that has a 70% chance of advancing past the first round and that team wins, you’ll receive 30 points (100% minus the percentage chance your selection will advance). If it has a 45% chance of advancing past the second round to the Sweet 16 and again advances, you’ll get 55 points. If it has a 20% chance of reaching the Elite Eight and you get that pick right, you’ll get 80 points.
College hoops fans filling out a bracket expect to be able to complete it in one sitting sometime between Selection Sunday and the tip of the first games rather than coming back each round to make new selections based on matchups. To allow for this, our model uses the conditional probabilities of each team reaching each round based on their possible matchups to determine points.
The beauty of this scoring system is the likelihood of any team in the tournament – no matter how highly it’s seeded – goes down round by round. That means the available points for a correct pick will go up round by round. So, just as with your traditional pool with a set scoring system, you’ll get more points for correctly picking a perennial power in the Final Four than correctly picking the same perennial power in the second round. It’s just that you’ll get far more points for correctly picking a bubble team in the Final Four than picking that perennial power.
Being bold has the potential to help you rack up enormous point totals, but only if your hunches are correct. It doesn’t do any good to pick a massive underdog that loses by 30.
You have to truly believe in top seeds to pick them to go far and find the underdogs you truly believe in and stick with them. If you’re right, you’ll get more than bragging rights.
If you want to pick the favorite in every game, you better hope your friends miss on their upset picks. But if you’re ready to embrace the chaos that is March Madness, join us for the best way to score your pool.
We wanted to implement this more specific and rewarding scoring system while retaining everything we’ve come to know and love about filling out a bracket and entering bracket pools. That’s why everything else about the Opta Analyst Predictor Bracket follows the familiar bracket pool timeframes and user expectations.
Registration is already open, but you of course won’t be able to make your picks for the men’s or women’s tournaments until after the bracket schedules are released on Sunday, March 16, and we run our model. It wouldn’t make sense to allow picks before the tournament field is set, so check back shortly after the tournament schedule has been decided to make your selections.
The percent likelihood of each team reaching each round will change slightly after the First Four games have been played, but they will be locked in from there. Regardless of whether you fill your bracket out before those games are played or after they are played, the scoring system will use the win probabilities of each team after the First Four. Because of that, you may want to check your picks before the first games on Thursday, but that’s not required.
So sign up now and create your pool with friends, wait for the conference tournaments to end, then come back after Selection Sunday to complete your bracket.
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