We are officially in the best week of the year. Even if you haven’t watched one second of college basketball this year, nothing rivals building your bracket and the wild upsets that follow it. Now, let me tell you something you don’t know. If you are, in fact, one of those countless people who doesn’t watch college basketball until March Madness, you are not at a disadvantage. No, this is not one of those articles where I tell you that my Mom has the same odds as Brad Evans to win her bracket contest. Contrary to what some believe, it is not random luck. Today, I’ll point out some of the annual traps that can get your bracket in trouble then reveal a historically proven way to multiply your odds of winning by your bracket contest. While nothing short of a time machine would be a lock, it takes your mathematical odds of winning a 200 person contest from 0.5% up to 2.3%. That may not seem like much, it does make you four times more likely to win. Think of it this way, you are getting the equivalent of three entries for free.

That manic college basketball nut that I mentioned from your bracket contests, they have nowhere close to all of the information. In fact, if they have seen 40 games, they will likely draw incomplete conclusions that lead them to make failing decisions. This is because the eye test is often deceiving. It would be more trustworthy if they had seen closer to 4o0 games, but no one can realistically do that. Likewise, these narratives and catchy stats, or the idea that superstars often carry their teams to titles are traps. They are a mirage developed from our own selective memory and from media members looking for clicks or views. Rather, it is pure, beautiful math that consistently paints the truest picture of what is to come.

Those nerdy number crunchers over at TeamRankings are your best friends. Rather than read the countless, misleading articles that may be interesting, but will unintentionally distort the data, you would be much better off spending that time making yourself very familiar with the predictive metrics they make available to you. Vegas makes gobs of money using overall models like this to beat the public and sites like TeamRankings build even stronger models that constantly beat Vegas. I’ve got a simple algorithm that draws from their model and the models of KenPom and FiveThirtyEight to help you quickly digest the most important of their consensus data.

Now, all bracket contests are different, so be sure to familiarize yourself with the scoring systems you are competing in and apply to obvious adjustments to what I’m about to tell you. In default scoring contests, picking the correct champion is not only important, it is essential if you want to win the top prize. Getting this correct is the equivilant of nailing every single Sweet 16 prediction or the entire first round. In fact, it is more so because in the first round, everyone will get 20 to 26 points, so you are practically just gaining 6 to 12 points on the field if you were to miracuously predict the first round perfectly. When you get your champion correct, you gain 32 points on most of your competition.

The crew at TeamRankings.com stayed up all night crunching the March Madness numbers. Get the best bracket for your pool

When I’m building a bracket in a standard scoring contest, my approach is methodical, but simple:

1. Asses the size of the group
2. Pick the champion that most improves my odds in a group of that size
3. Don’t screw up the rest by getting cute

Every year, I take the public bracket data on Yahoo! Sports and ESPN that tell us how often each team is predicted to win the championship. I then translate it into my group size to project how many brackets will pick each team winning.

Now, if I’m trying to improve my odds of picking the correct champion, which will ultimately go a long way toward increasing my chances of winning my contest, I must determine the true odds that the team will win. I pulled the consensus predictive ratings of each team (from TeamRankings, KenPom and FiveThirty Eight), plugged it into an RNG and simulated 10,000 brackets. Taking from that, I multiplied each team’s championship odds by the group size in order to normalize the data for comparison.

Do not operate under the impression that only a select handful of teams have a shot to cut down the nets. There are three who stand out from the pack, but nearly 20 have a realistic shot to accomplish the feat and frankly, even Penn could possibly do it. There have been some surprising champions, who before the tournament would have been given a 2% chance to win or less. Given a large enough sample size, those oddities eventually surface.

When we stick the two charts together, we can see just how much each champion option will influence your odds of winning. In a 50-person contest, before any brackets selected, each entry has exactly a 2% chance of winning. Once the brackets are locked, however, that all changes. If you are one of 15 people to pick Virginia, that would mean you’d have to beat out 14 others with the rest of your bracket if Virginia pulled off their true 6.7 to 1 odds of winning. Or, you could be the only person in your group to pick 2-seed Cincinnati, who the models have as the 4th best team in the country. They’ve got a 7.0% shot of winning it all, which means if this tournament were played out 50 times, Cincy would win 3 or 4 of the 50. In those 3 or 4 circumstances, you would almost certainly cruise to the top prize unless someone else in your contest was either reading this article, a Cincy alum, or of course, if you butchered the remainder of your bracket. We will get to that in a second, but first, let’s see how each team helps or hurts your odds.

As you can see in this chart, the best options change depending on group size. In a 10-person contest, your best bet is to pick Duke followed by Villanova. Virtually every other group size, Cincinnati is your best bet. As previously mentioned, beginning your bracket with them as champs more than quadruple your odds of taking down the pool. The exception to this is in a monster 500-person group, where you would almost certainly be the only person who uses 6-seed, Houston, as their champion. The consensus metrics tell us that they’ve got nearly a 1 in 100 chance of winning the tournament, which means if you are the only bracket using them, your odds of winning improve nearly 500%.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, the rest of your bracket is also important, just not as tricky as this. What it really comes down to is that while sleeper picks and cinderellas are fun, trying to squeeze them into your bracket against the odds of success is merely shooting yourself in the foot. You would be best served to take a few 9 or 10 seeds and an 11 or 12 seed in the first round as upsets. Sure, more than that will happen, but more often than not, you will choose the wrong one. Leave that up to your opponents and gladly accept the advantage they gift you with when 7 of their 10 attempts fail. Likewise, in the Sweet 16, you can pick a few upsets, and likely should (hello again, Houston), but don’t get too wild with it, lest you need the first five rounds as a tiebreaker. In terms of the final four, you may be required to make another pick that returns more expected value than the public consensus. For instance, if you choose to use Duke, who is a quality selection in a 25-person contest, you might want to slip Gonzaga into the Final Four a 4 seed. They may not be as trendy as UNC, but according to the models, their odds of advancing out of the region are a very close second to UNC.

If you have any specific questions and TeamRankings‘ killer site can’t help you, don’t hesitate to drop me a note on Twitter and I’ll do my best to help everyone.