How To Choose Your Teams:

You can choose your TournamentGeek pool entry teams any way you want, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

Team Quality: The NCAA selects what they see as the best four teams for their number 1 seeds. BUT, you may think one of the 1 seeds is way better than the others. Or, one of them may face teams in their region that are not as good as in other regions, giving them a better chance of winning. The same is true, of course, for teams at each seed level. If you have detected such hidden opportunities buried in the seed assignments, you'll want to base your selections on your insight.

Bracket Structure: The NCAA tournament always follows the same "bracket structure". For example, the 1 seed in each region always plays the 16 seed in the first round. The 8 seed always plays the 9 seed, and so on. The entire pattern assigning game winners to future rounds is the same every year. This is called "the bracket". (I don't know why.) This bracket structure is reproduced for you in one of the team selection modes (Bracket), so you can see where winning teams will meet in the tournament.

You will want to consider this bracket structure when you choose your teams - or maybe not. The bracket determines when one of your teams will eliminate another one of your teams if they both have won their earlier games. So it will determine the best-case and worst-case score your selections can produce. If, for example, you choose the 1 seed and 16 seed in the same region, you are guaranteed to win a first round game in that region, AND you are guaranteed to lose one of your selections in that game as well.

SO, Here Are Some Example Strategies: People really have used all of these.

1. Choose each team based on your expert knowledge of the teams' strengths and weaknesses. Show everybody how smart you are.

2. Choose all of the teams in a single region. You will be guaranteed 15 wins no matter which region you choose, since your teams are all playing against each other in the 1st through 4th rounds. Unfortunately, you cannot get more than 17 wins in the whole tournament. A little boring, maybe.

3. A mix of your great sports knowledge (or advice you got from Google) and spreading your choices across the regions. I'd say this is the most common strategy.

4. Pick teams with mascots you like. This reduces your research burden and offers the chance to humiliate the sports experts in your pool. This strategy has performed well in the past.

7. Schools attended by people you like and people you don't.

6. Darts.

TournamentGeek will show you the best and worst case scores for your selections as you make them, helping you fine-tune your choices. Later, you can see your prospects change as the tournament progresses.