NOTE: If you don’t want to read my post, just check out the website here.
Today is one of the best days of the sports calendar. For the next fourteen hours, there will be at least one college basketball game on. Everyone will be watching them and talking about them. They’ll be staggered perfectly so that there is always one in the last ten minutes of the second half, the best part of a college basketball game. It’s going to be sick.
If you’ve filled out a bracket and entered into a pool, each game will feel like a life-or-death gauntlet. And of course it is. But some games are more equal than others. Should you be sweating that 10-7 upset that less than half your pool picked, even though you have that 10 seed losing in the next round? Or do you need to focus your energy on the 3 seed that you have breaking seed and making the Elite Eight? Everyone has that 3-seed winning this game though, so in the short term, it’s not going to help you move up in the standings if they win, and it’s not going to hurt you if they lose. And also, what if one of the brackets most similar to yours has that 3 seed making the finals? You now need that team to lose at some point before the Final Four if you want to win the pool. Is this the right time for that loss?
Especially early on in the tournament, there are games where not only might you not know how much to care, but which team to root for. You might say: “who cares who I root for, that has no impact on the actual outcome of the game.” What a dumb thing for you to say. Of course it has an impact, and if you’re not careful, you’ll unwittingly work against your own interests.
So you need to do some math. You need to calculate your current winning probability, and how much that changes depending on the outcome of each upcoming game, and in what direction. This is a finite tournament, there are only 63 games, and there are only 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible outcomes, each with a straightforwardly calculable likelihood. Figure out which of those outcomes result in your victory, which of those require a win for a team in the upcoming game in question, and whether your total winning probability increases or decreases if they win. Might take you a while, but it’s not hard.
If you’re too impatient to do this properly, you’re in luck. My friend Imran and I have made a website that does it for you, as long as you are using an ESPN pool. Because we are also impatient (and cheap), we do not calculate out all nine quintillion possible outcomes either; we just simulate the tournament ten thousand times and go from there (you can keep adding more simulations to your heart’s content though.) We use probabilities generated from Nate Silver’s new rating system to run our Monte Carlo simulations.
If all goes according to plan, this website should update live every time a game ends. We hope each update brings you an increasingly sophisticated, precise assessment of just how screwed your bracket is.