Obviously I'm rooting for the University of Washington and, as I did last year with WSU, I now provide you all with some home-state photography (this is the UW campus).
So I wound up entering four pools, which is a lot for a guy who won't watch any games at all (our TV gets no reception). The office pool, the courthouse pool, the Audacity of Hoops, and an unusual pool run by med school friends, "the eight-team pool."
In the eight-team pool, you pick eight teams and every time one wins, you earn the number of points corresponding to that team's rank. So if you pick UNC, you'll probably receive 4 or 5 points total, 1 point for each win. Whereas if you picked Maryland, you already would have 10 points in the bag... but you'd have run the risk of zero points from that team.
One strategy would be to try to pick the likeliest upsets (Maryland, Texas A&M, USC, Tennessee) and hope you're right on all of them and win 80 or 90 points. If you think the winner is sure to be someone who just happens to make amazingly lucky picks, then your only hope of winning is to try to be that amazingly lucky person. In other words, to generate a score high enough to win, you're forced to bet on risky outcomes.
My hope is that there are not enough people in the pool for someone to get lucky on every single pick. So I went for a blended approach, with some "sure thing" bets and some stretches, hoping that some better-than-expected performances will net me an average of eight points from each of my eight teams. My picks were: Kansas, Wake Forest, West Virginia, USC, Duke, UCLA, Texas, Clemson.
Thoughts? I see now that if Duke and Texas both win, they would play each other the next round, so that was a dumb move.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Eight-Team Pool
Obviously I'm rooting for the University of Washington and, as I did last year with WSU, I now provide you all with some home-state photography (this is the UW campus).
So I wound up entering four pools, which is a lot for a guy who won't watch any games at all (our TV gets no reception). The office pool, the courthouse pool, the Audacity of Hoops, and an unusual pool run by med school friends, "the eight-team pool."
In the eight-team pool, you pick eight teams and every time one wins, you earn the number of points corresponding to that team's rank. So if you pick UNC, you'll probably receive 4 or 5 points total, 1 point for each win. Whereas if you picked Maryland, you already would have 10 points in the bag... but you'd have run the risk of zero points from that team.
One strategy would be to try to pick the likeliest upsets (Maryland, Texas A&M, USC, Tennessee) and hope you're right on all of them and win 80 or 90 points. If you think the winner is sure to be someone who just happens to make amazingly lucky picks, then your only hope of winning is to try to be that amazingly lucky person. In other words, to generate a score high enough to win, you're forced to bet on risky outcomes.
My hope is that there are not enough people in the pool for someone to get lucky on every single pick. So I went for a blended approach, with some "sure thing" bets and some stretches, hoping that some better-than-expected performances will net me an average of eight points from each of my eight teams. My picks were: Kansas, Wake Forest, West Virginia, USC, Duke, UCLA, Texas, Clemson.
Thoughts? I see now that if Duke and Texas both win, they would play each other the next round, so that was a dumb move.
