What Is A Bracket Pool
March Madness pools are a form of sports betting based on the annual NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament each spring in the United States. The increasing interest in this event is fostered by March Madness pools, or brackets. A bracket is a form that can be completed on-line or printed out and completed by hand whereby the participant predicts the outcome of each game in the tournament. His or her predictions are compared against others in the pool, and whoever has the best prognostication skills wins the contest.
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Bracket Pool Rules This format works just like the popular March Madness Bracket format that people are familiar with: Members pick from a standard bracket of 16 or 64 teams Points are awarded for each winning pick. Bracket and Pool Names. Submitted by Jaqen H'ghar on March 17th, 2014 at 10:36 AM. Log in or register to post comments; I know we've got some creative minds out there.
Background[edit]
Tournament bids[edit]
Sixty-eight (68) teams line up with a chance to win the national title. It is not just the best 68 teams from among the more than 350 teams that play Division Ibasketball, though. Teams are split into 32 conferences, and each of those conferences has an automatic bid. Every conference plays a season-ending conference tournament, and gives the automatic bid to the winner.[1] The other 36 teams are chosen by a selection committee. They are called at-large bids, and they generally go to the 36 most deserving teams. It is difficult to pick the 36 best teams, and the process is very subjective and can be very controversial.
Seeds[edit]
The four lowest ranked automatic bid teams and the four lowest ranked at-large teams in the tournament play in special play-in games called the First Four before the tournament.[2] The rest of the field is split into four regions of 16 teams, and those regions are seeded from one to 16. The top team in each region plays the 16th team, the second plays the 15th and so on. The winners of each game goes on to the next round and so on until only one team is standing. A team is knocked out of the tournament and has to go home as soon as they lose once, so the pressure is incredibly intense.
Timeframe[edit]
The tournament takes place over three weekends starting soon after the middle of March.
Brackets[edit]
Perhaps the biggest key to the tremendous popularity of the tournament is the bracket. The March Madness bracket is the grid of all the teams in the tournament and the path they have to follow to the Final Four and the championship game. Filling out a bracket with the winners of each of the 63 games is an incredibly difficult task, and nobody has successfully filled out a perfect bracket. If games were 50/50 propositions, the chances of a bracket being perfect are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion).[3]Some March Madness contests are free to enter, others require an entry fee. Many businesses utilize pool hosting services to run their pools, allowing them the flexibility to customize the pool rules and display.
Popularity[edit]
March Madness has become one of the most popular sporting events in the United States.[4][5] Because of the length of the tournament and the number of teams involved it is one of the most popular sporting events in terms of television ratings. One event associated with March Madness is filling out the brackets. It has become extremely common in popular culture, even among non-sports fans; it is estimated that tens of millions of Americans participate in the contest every year. Mainstream media outlets such as ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports and TheBigTourney.com host tournaments online where contestants can enter for free. Employers have also noticed a change in the behavior of employees during this time: they have seen an increase in the number of sick days used, extended lunch breaks and even the rescheduling of conference calls to allow for more tournament watching.[6] There are also many handicappers and pundits which offer advice for winning your bracket.[7][8]
References[edit]
- ^Explanation of March Madness
- ^'Bracketology with Joe Lunardi'. ESPN.com. January 12, 2015. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
- ^Szczerba, Robert J. 'Bracketology 101: Picking A Perfect Bracket Is Actually Easier Than You Think'. Forbes. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
- ^Geiling, Natasha (March 20, 2014). 'When Did Filling Out A March Madness Bracket Become Popular?'. Smithsonian. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
- ^Deford, Frank (March 9, 2011). 'What makes March Madness so popular? Its knockout nature'. Sports Illustrated. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
- ^Petrecca, Laura (March 15, 2012). 'March Madness in the Office: Work Come in Second'. USA Today. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
- ^Trotter, Ryan (March 18, 2013). 'Geeks Can Win March Madness Pools'. Retrieved March 10, 2014.
- ^Boudway, Ira (March 18, 2013). 'How to Win Your March Madness Pool'. Business Week. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
Further reading[edit]
- Adams T (2018). Improving Your NCAA Bracket with Statistics. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
- Feng E (2016). How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool. The Power Rank, Inc.
- Poundstone W (2014). Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody. Little, Brown and Company.
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As you scroll down the page you will find a list of all of our Double Elimination Tournament brackets. These are available in both Seeded and Blind Draw formats. All of our brackets are available to print for free, and if you visit our store some of them are also available on large 24' x 32' prints. If you're interested in editing the whole bracket in live mode, check out our Fillable Brackets. When using most of our free printable versions, once you have found the correct bracket, you will have two options. You can either just print the bracket or you you can click 'Customize this Bracket', which will allow you to quickly edit the title of the bracket and print. You can see this in the image below.
| Double Elimination 'Blind Draw' | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Teams | 4 Teams | 5 Teams | 6 Teams | 7 Teams | 8 Teams |
| 9 Teams | 10 Teams | 11 Teams | 12 Teams | 13 Teams | 14 Teams |
| 15 Teams | 16 Teams | 17 Teams | 18 Teams | 19 Teams | 20 Teams |
| 21 Teams | 22 Teams | 23 Teams | 24 Teams | 25 Teams | 26 Teams |
| 27 Teams | 28 Teams | 29 Teams | 30 Teams | 31 Teams | 32 Teams |
| 33 Teams | 34 Teams | 35 Teams | 36 Teams | 37 Teams | 38 Teams |
| 39 Teams | 40 Teams | 41 Teams | 42 Teams | 43 Teams | 44 Teams |
| 45 Teams | 46 Teams | 47 Teams | 48 Teams | 49 Teams | 50 Teams |
| 51 Teams | 52 Teams | 53 Teams | 54 Teams | 55 Teams | 56 Teams |
| 57 Teams | 58 Teams | 59 Teams | 60 Teams | 61 Teams | 62 Teams |
| 63 Teams | 64 Teams | ||||
| Double Elimination 'Seeded' | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Teams | 4 Teams | 5 Teams | 6 Teams | 7 Teams | 8 Teams |
| 9 Teams | 10 Teams | 11 Teams | 12 Teams | 13 Teams | 14 Teams |
| 15 Teams | 16 Teams | 17 Teams | 18 Teams | 19 Teams | 20 Teams |
| 21 Teams | 22 Teams | 23 Teams | 24 Teams | 25 Teams | 26 Teams |
| 27 Teams | 28 Teams | 29 Teams | 30 Teams | 31 Teams | 32 Teams |
| 33 Teams | 34 Teams | 35 Teams | 36 Teams | 37 Teams | 38 Teams |
| 39 Teams | 40 Teams | 41 Teams | 42 Teams | 43 Teams | 44 Teams |
| 45 Teams | 46 Teams | 47 Teams | 48 Teams | 49 Teams | 50 Teams |
| 51 Teams | 52 Teams | 53 Teams | 54 Teams | 55 Teams | 56 Teams |
| 57 Teams | 58 Teams | 59 Teams | 60 Teams | 61 Teams | 62 Teams |
| 63 Teams | 64 Teams | ||||
Example:
The Double Elimination brackets above are free to print. The two sections above are broken up between 'Blind Draw' and 'Seeded'. We also have printable Single Elimination Brackets and Triple Elimination Brackets available.
If you are not familiar with running double elimination tournaments, the above illustration and the comments below should help guide you through setting up and running your tournament. The bracket above is a 16 Team 'Seeded' double elimination bracket. The same idea is used for all brackets, not matter what the number of participants are.
A: The letter 'A' points to the 'Seeds' of the tournament, if you have pre-ranked your participants based on strength or a season record you would put each team's name on the corresponding line. If you are printing a blind draw bracket these numbers will not appear on the bracket, but the rest of the bracket will be exactly the same.
B: The letter 'B' points to the order in which the games are to be played. Simply start by playing the game labeled (1) and continue until all games are completed.
C: The letter 'C' points to the position where the loser of each game would move to. These are labeled L1, L2, L3 ect.. All you have to do is look at the Winner's Bracket to see what game number was played, and the loser of that game would drop down to the corresponding location in the losers bracket.
D: The letter 'D' represents the Championship game. Game 14 in the above illustration is the Championship between the Winner of the Winner's Bracket(Zero Losses) and the Winner of the Loser's bracket(1 Loss). If the team from the Winner's Bracket wins then they are the champions. If the team from the Loser's Bracket wins, then game 15(dotted lines) in the above illustration would be played. Whoever wins that game would then be the champions. We have also created a cool little tool that will calculate the total Number of Games in a Tournament.
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