Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

Twenty-four million people wager nearly $3 billion on college basketball pools each year, but few are aware that winning strategies have been developed by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and other universities over the past two decades. Bad advice from media sources and even our own psychological inclinations are often a bigger obstacle to winning than our pool opponents. Profit opportunities are missed and most brackets submitted to pools don’t have a breakeven chance to win money before the tournament begins.

Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics is both an easy-to-use tip sheet to improve your winning odds and an intellectual history of how statistical reasoning has been applied to the bracket pool using standard and innovative methods. It covers bracket improvement methods ranging from those that require only the information in the seeded bracket to sophisticated estimation techniques available via online simulations. Included are:

  • Prominently displayed bracket improvement tips based on the published research
  • A history of the origins of the bracket pool
  • A history of bracket improvement methods and their results in play
  • Historical sketches and background information on the mathematical and statistical methods that have been used in bracket analysis
  • A source list of good bracket pool advice available each year that seeks to be comprehensive
  • Warnings about common bad advice that will hurt your chances

Tom Adams’ work presenting bracket improvement methods has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and SmartMoney magazine.

1137898941
Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

Twenty-four million people wager nearly $3 billion on college basketball pools each year, but few are aware that winning strategies have been developed by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and other universities over the past two decades. Bad advice from media sources and even our own psychological inclinations are often a bigger obstacle to winning than our pool opponents. Profit opportunities are missed and most brackets submitted to pools don’t have a breakeven chance to win money before the tournament begins.

Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics is both an easy-to-use tip sheet to improve your winning odds and an intellectual history of how statistical reasoning has been applied to the bracket pool using standard and innovative methods. It covers bracket improvement methods ranging from those that require only the information in the seeded bracket to sophisticated estimation techniques available via online simulations. Included are:

  • Prominently displayed bracket improvement tips based on the published research
  • A history of the origins of the bracket pool
  • A history of bracket improvement methods and their results in play
  • Historical sketches and background information on the mathematical and statistical methods that have been used in bracket analysis
  • A source list of good bracket pool advice available each year that seeks to be comprehensive
  • Warnings about common bad advice that will hurt your chances

Tom Adams’ work presenting bracket improvement methods has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and SmartMoney magazine.

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Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

by Tom Adams
Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics

by Tom Adams

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Overview

Twenty-four million people wager nearly $3 billion on college basketball pools each year, but few are aware that winning strategies have been developed by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and other universities over the past two decades. Bad advice from media sources and even our own psychological inclinations are often a bigger obstacle to winning than our pool opponents. Profit opportunities are missed and most brackets submitted to pools don’t have a breakeven chance to win money before the tournament begins.

Improving Your NCAA® Bracket with Statistics is both an easy-to-use tip sheet to improve your winning odds and an intellectual history of how statistical reasoning has been applied to the bracket pool using standard and innovative methods. It covers bracket improvement methods ranging from those that require only the information in the seeded bracket to sophisticated estimation techniques available via online simulations. Included are:

  • Prominently displayed bracket improvement tips based on the published research
  • A history of the origins of the bracket pool
  • A history of bracket improvement methods and their results in play
  • Historical sketches and background information on the mathematical and statistical methods that have been used in bracket analysis
  • A source list of good bracket pool advice available each year that seeks to be comprehensive
  • Warnings about common bad advice that will hurt your chances

Tom Adams’ work presenting bracket improvement methods has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and SmartMoney magazine.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780429943942
Publisher: CRC Press
Publication date: 01/14/2019
Series: ASA-CRC Series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 193
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Tom Adams is the creator of Poologic, a website that has provided research-based advice on winning bracket pools since 2000. Poologic has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, SmartMoney, and other publications. He is a systems analyst who has spent most of his career in scientific research support. He has publications in the area of statistics and probability. He has a BSc in mathematics from the University of North Carolina.

Table of Contents

1. The Birth of the Pool. 2. Predicting the Tournament Outcome. 3. Ratings versus Seedings. 4. The Conquest of Pools with Upset Incentives. 5. Predicting Your Opponent's Brackets. 6. Parametric Whole-Bracket Optimization. 7. A Practical Contrarian Strategy. 8. Statistical Hypothesis Testing. 9. Psychobracketology. 10. Bracket Advice Sources. 11. Basketball Knowledge Considered Harmful

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