The Trans-Continental March Madness Pool

Making Picks

It all starts on Selection Sunday, which is on March 14, 2010 this year.  At 6pm the NCAA Selection Committee announces the 64 (it's actually 65, but see the last sentence of this section) team field for the tournament.  Sometime shortly after that, /ncaa/ will cease to show last year's results.  Instead, it will show those 64 teams on an entry page which YOU can use to seek (trivial) fame and (moderate) fortune.  All you have to do is try to pick which teams will win in each and every game of the tournament, right on down to the champion.  If you've never done this before you can just use the seeding #s (1 through 16) on the edges of the pages next to each team and you'll have as much chance as anyone.  Lower is better: a 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, but the odds quickly even out as the seeds get closer so that a 7/10 matchup is pretty much a 50/50 proposition.  You have until at least 11:59pm on Wednesday night to make your decisions.  Give your entry a unique name in the Pick Name field and provide your real, honest-to-goodness name and email in the other two fields, click Send Your Entry and you're done! You'll also get an invite to the discussion forum for the pool as confirmation. Join it if you want to talk trash with the other participants.

When you click Send Your Entry, the web page should either tell you if you forgot something, or show the picks you just made. You may want to print it, and you should definitely check your entries for correctness! You won't be able to see this page again before the games start on Thursday.  Also, note that your picks do not have to be logically consistent.  By this, I mean that, if you want to, you can pick a team to lose in one round but win in a later round, even though both things can't actually happen. You should use the arrows to carry down your winners from each game rather than the pull down boxes if you want logically consistent picks.  It's faster and eliminates the risk of entry errors.  Finally, we ignore the play-in game; If you are brave enough to choose that 16 seed, you get whatever team turns up there.

Winning, waiting, hoping...

Sometime early Thursday morning, when we are no longer accepting new picks but before the games start, /ncaa/ will change to a huge grid showing the picks of everyone in the pool.  The key of what number corresponds to each team is at the bottom.  It's a bit hard to read, but if anyone has a better way of showing thousands of game choices together on a single page, I'd love to hear about it.  As game results come in, columns on this grid will turn green or red indicating right and wrong picks.  You get 1 point for every first round game you get right, 2 for each correct Sweet 16 pick, 4 for accurate Elite 8 selections, 8 for each proper Final Four team, 16 a piece for predicting Championship contenders and 32 points for identifying the team that wins it all.  Quite simply, whoever has the most points at the end wins.  So, you don't have to pick the tournament winner to win the pool, but it helps.  Also, if you get fewer points than anyone else EVER has in the history of the pool, you win a free entry next year.  The current low is 12 points by Trish in 2009.

You can sort the results by pick name (the default), points, and potential (the # of points that it's possible for you to still get).  You can also click on a pick name to see that set of picks in bracket form.  You should check your picks for correctness this way.  Once games have started, I can't make any changes.

Kittens (they're delicious!)

It costs 10 kittens per entry to play and you can play as many entries as you like.  They all go back out as prizes at the end; just like the players, I'm doing this for education and love of the game.  The preferred method is to give them to me in person, possibly via the person who referred you to the pool.  If that's not easy use postal mail, and send them to:

Robert Giardalas
260 W 25th St
New York, NY 10001

You can paypal 'em to esekla@yahoo.com, but the payment must be done as a "personal transfer"!  If you don't, I will be charged for the transaction and will be effectively losing money.  If you want to make it a credit card payment or something other than a personal transfer, please send me an extra dollar per entry to cover the fees.

No matter how you go about it, please send them in as early as possible, so that prizes can go out.  Everything that comes in goes back out in prizes.  1st place gets 65%, 2nd gets 25% and 3rd is 10%.  If there is a tie, the players split the sum of the places that they would occupy consecutively.  For instance, if there is a clear winner, but a two-way tie for second, then those two players split second & third place combined.  As a further example, if three or more players tie for first, they split the entire pot evenly amongst them.