March Madness bracket pool strategy: 5 games you need to get right to win

You’re pouring over your bracket, getting deep into the metrics and season-long results of High Point, Northern Iowa, Kennesaw State and teams of that ilk, trying to pick out the first round upsets, but here’s the secret: Since they’re only worth one point to your total score, like old golf adage “drive for show, putt for dough,” hitting an upset or two on Thursday or Friday is entirely for bragging rights.

What really matters is what happens in April, as the only thing that’s mandatory for your chances of winning your bracket pool is grabbing the 32 points awarded in Yahoo’s Men's Bracket Mayhem.

It’s crucial that you understand that once you pick that champion, you join a cohort of others with the same selection, and those entries are the only ones you’re really competing with, because of how scoring works.

Here is the pick distribution (via Yahoo!) for bracket challenges:

Duke: 29% picked as national champion

Arizona: 21%

Michigan: 14%

Florida: 6%

Houston: 5.5%

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For example, if you pick Duke as your champion, for every 100 entries there are in your pool, you are competing with 29 of them. Once you get to just the eighth-most popular pick (Iowa State) and down, you’re only competing with 1% of the population.

If nothing else, the information above shows the gap between the No. 1 seeds. If you look at BetMGM’s betting odds, here is the implied championship win probability for each of those four:

• Duke +300: 25.0%

• Michigan +350: 22.2%

• Arizona +400: 20.0%

• Florida +650: 13.3%

After Selection Sunday, you could have believed that all four would be selected close to equally, but Duke’s getting picked to win twice as often as Michigan, and four times as frequently as the defending champion Florida Gators.

Tip: The bigger the gap between pick distribution and implied odds percentage, the more valuable the championship pick in your bracket.

The 5 games you need to get right

On the understanding that the champion is where your competition begins, how can you differentiate from the rest of those like-minded individuals?

Do you need to pick off a 1-seed or a 2-seed in the first round? Absolutely not. Auto-advance those eight to the next round. 

From there, all you need to get right is just five other games in the entire tournament.

East region first round: (11) South Florida vs. (6) Louisville

Early on, you don’t really need to get any game right where you have that team losing in the next round anyway. So, if a miracle upset happens that you didn’t see coming, but you had the favored team losing in the next round anyway, don’t sweat it. In fact, cheer it on, because someone else probably had that team going farther and now won’t be getting those points.

[Contrarian strategies to help you win your bracket pool]

Beyond the points you accrue for the teams you advance correctly in your bracket in the next four sections (and with the champion), there’s going to be a toss-up game that you’ll look at and say “either team could win the next game, too.”

South Florida-Louisville is that game this year, where the winner has a real chance to beat Michigan State. At THE WINDOW, we have the Spartans as just 4.5-point favorites in a matchup with the Cardinals, and it would be tighter than that if Mikel Brown Jr. was 100%. South Florida is a relative unknown and would be a longer shot, but if the Bulls can beat the Cardinals, they can beat Michigan State.

Tip: The 8-9 games are tightly-lined, but with so few entrants willing to take the unnecessary risk of backing one to knock off a 1-seed in the second round, they’re largely irrelevant when the points are added up at the end. The second round upsets you want to pinpoint start with a 3-seed going down.

East region second round: (5) Kansas vs. (4) St. John’s

In the same vein as our first-round game, the second-round game you need to get right pits two teams that could make the regional final — and you’d advance that school accordingly.

This could have also been Wisconsin-Arkansas, which also falls into the category of two double-digit first-round favorites that are highly likely to meet in Round 2, and are live to beat the 1-seed in their region in the Sweet 16. 

With Arizona healthier than Duke, the Blue Devils could be more vulnerable to an upset, given the athletic depth and star power of Darryn Peterson and Kansas or the physicality of St. John’s. Of course, the Jayhawks and Johnnies have to get by each other first, in a game that should be lined right around pick’em in the betting market. 

Getting this game right and having the winner successfully upset Duke will make a big dent against the competition with so many people picking the Blue Devils to go all the way.

Tip: The chalkier the tournament results, the more points you need to win.

South region Sweet 16: (5) Vanderbilt vs. (1) Florida

You’re seeing Florida’s low pick distribution numbers, and you’re intrigued about riding the champs to go back-to-back, given the value relative to their title odds. Then you see the one team the Gators were beaten soundly by all season, and just last week no less.

[Bracket Mayhem 101: How to use experts picks to fill out your bracket]

Vanderbilt was five minutes away from an SEC tournament championship, and getting all the attention this week, but losing to Arkansas doesn’t mean they’re not capable of a repeat performance against Florida and the ability to come out of the South. Of course, the Gators will, again, be around 6.5-point favorites, and will be out for revenge.

Tip: Use point spread projections to help you decide what level of risk you’re willing to take.

Midwest region Elite Eight: (2) Iowa State vs. (1) Michigan

For my money, the most likely regional final matchup is Cyclones-Wolverines in the Midwest. A fourth Michigan Big Ten tournament win proves that some late-season issues, that essentially capped the ceiling of their play-level (as they stopped covering point spreads) after the L.J. Cason injury, have gone by the wayside.

With Iowa State projected to be just a one-possession underdog, if the Cyclones beat Michigan to get to the Final Four, they could win the whole thing. Either team is a contender for the next game you have to get right.

Tip: Taking this winner as your champion or even finalist adds risk, which means you might want to lean to the favorite. In turn, if knocking the winner out in the next round, you should be more willing to take the underdog.

Final Four (the team that’s going to lose to your champion)

You picked your champion and now you’re either in a large cohort with Duke, Arizona, or Michigan, or you’ve put yourself in a tighter group of hopefuls.

If you’re planning to battle with more entrants, the pick for the championship loser probably needs to be a little spicier, but don’t fall for the recommendation that you have to get wild with your other finalist.

If you took Florida last year, it was you against 21% of the field, but given only 29% had Houston in the final, just 6% had “Florida over Houston,” even though they were both one-seeds.

In a 300-entrant pool, you needed to beat just 12 others with that combination, and all you also needed was the winner in the one key game of the first four rounds (BYU over VCU, Michigan over Texas A&M, Michigan State into the Elite Eight, and Houston over Tennessee), and you definitely won your pool regardless of what else you did.

Good luck!

Tip: Fill out your bracket with the above decisions made and then go back and do the rest. Since those games won’t matter as much, you can have as much fun as you like in trying to impress your friends.

You can find more valuable college basketball betting analysis from Yahoo Sports betting contributor, Matt Russell, at THE WINDOW.