March Madness: How to Win Your Office Pool

Maximizing Win Probability: When filling out your March Madness bracket, remember that your primary goal is not to pick the most likely bracket, but rather the bracket that has the best chance of winning your pool.

Maximizing win probability requires the player to consider not only a team's odds, but also the distribution of picks of the other participants in his pool as well as pool size.

For example, consider a single entry into a 100 bracket pool. One would expect to win this pool (and the corresponding bragging rights) about 1% of the time, and our goal as a savvy bettor is to increase that probability. Most basketball fans are aware that Kansas is the best team in the country this year, and also the team that is most likely to win the tournament. Sports books in Las Vegas estimate their chances to be around 20-25%.

Picking Your 2010 Final-4 / Elite-8
If you need a team to make a surprise Final 4/Elite 8 run there are plenty of good choices. WVU is a solid pick in a mid to small pool. A riskier choice for a pool large enough to accommodate their value is Wisconsin, who has a 9% chance to reach the F4 but was picked by only 2.1% to make it that far.

Georgetown (11.7% chance vs. 7.2% picked), Baylor, Kansas State and Pitt are all solid choices. Some great sleepers for 100+ entry pools are BYU (7.6% vs. 0.7%) and Michigan St (7.6% vs. 1.9%).

Villanova, with a 23% shot to reach the Final 4, but selected a shocking 32% of the time, is probably the worst possible pick.

March 16 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Michele Steele reports on possible strategies for chosing winning teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball tournament. Sources: Bloomberg , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-stoll/how-to-win-your-ncaa-tour_b_500421.html