Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Tips on making bracket pools fun

It's college basketball pool time, the time-honored tradition where we wager money on athletic competitions CBS paid billions to broadcast and charged millions for ad time, and everybody waxes poetic about amateur athletes.

Here are my tips to make a bracket pool as fun as possible:

  • You get one bracket. Period. You don't get a Duke bracket, a New Mexico bracket and a Syracuse bracket. They're your picks, and you stand by them. If you want to root for random selections, the New Mexico and Texas lotteries offer plenty of options.
  • If you don't pick at least one upset, you don't get to submit a bracket. We'll get back to this later.
  • Easiest way to score things is as follows: One point for correct first-round picks, two points for correct second-round picks and so on until the championship is worth six points. We'll follow with some point add-on suggestions.
  • There are four play-in games, where bubble teams play for the right to join the field of 64. They're normally not games you can pick in online brackets because they're considered sacrificial lambs for the first-round opponent waiting for them. In my game, you pick all four play-in winners and you get five points to start. No points otherwise.
  • The tournament is four brackets with teams seeded 1-16. If you correctly pick a win by a double-digit seed (Nos. 10-16), you get twice as many points. This means if you picked 11th-seeded George Mason to get to the Final Four in 2006, you'd have received an extra 10 points — enough to tilt the pool. High risk, high reward.
  • Create a bracket called, "Chalk." This is a bracket that only exists in the standings, and is associated with no player. The bracket is filled out with every favored seed winning, so you see only No. 1 seeds in the final four, and only No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the Elite Eight. The only point of this bracket is to mock people who are lower in the standings than "Chalk," especially with all of the bonus point opportunities.
  • Standings are updated only after the completion of rounds. Anybody who wants a mid-round update has to pay $1.
  • Anybody who picks against the local team receives no scorn upon submission of bracket; they're just making what they believe is a smart pick. If the local team wins, mock the traitor.
  • Money is split between the winner (50 percent), second place (30 percent), third place (10 percent) and the person who ran the scoring (10 percent).
  • Fourth-place finisher gets to kick out one person who finished below them, so everybody's got to be nice to them for a year.
  • Whoever finishes in last place has to enter the following year, and must pay double the standard entry fee.
  • Chances are that somebody will have clinched the win before the title game. However, no payouts until the morning following the title game.
  • Forget I said anything involving money, because gambling is illegal.
  • Wink.

Kevin Wilson is a columnist for Clovis Media Inc. He can be contacted at 763-3431, ext. 313, or by email: [email protected]

 
 
Rendered 03/03/2024 20:16