Sports betting has seen one of its biggest periods of the year this week as events got underway on both sides of the Atlantic. Anticipation ahead of this year’s Cheltenham Festival as well as the March Madness NCAA Tournament has been building for months. But the straw broke the camel’s back on Sunday when this year’s bracket was released.
This left us with one major question on our hands…What’s the best way to fill out your March Madness bracket? We asked our readers that very questions to see how you guys were thinking of filling in your bracket, and here are the results.
It was a close one, but 30% of you answered “a bruin would eat a cardinal”, demonstrating that the majority of your bracket-filling tactics will be reflected in the past success of UCLA Bruins. In second place, 26% of our readers said they’d spend “hours of skilled research” filling out their bracket, with a close third at 22% going the opposite way and flipping a coin.
However, perhaps those who voted “flipping a coin” should heed the advice of Michael Weimerskirch, a math professor at Augsburg College, Kentucky. He said in a report by Winnipeg Free Press that the odds of finding perfection that way — by flipping a coin to pick the winner of every game – are 1-in-100,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 1-in-100 million trillion. “You’re just as likely to win Powerball three consecutive times as you are to picking a perfect bracket by flipping a coin,” Weimerskirch said. So maybe not.
Probably just as likely to have similar odds, 15% of our readers said choosing their “favorite colors” would be how they’d do it. Polled last was “mathematical based on seeds” at a mere 7%. Does this mean our readers are all about leaving it to chance and fate? There’s probably no better way.
Why not vote in our next poll: Who wins your “If March Madness Were Poker” bracket? And let us know who your favourite March Madness Poker player would be.
