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Hello again everyone. If you look at your calendar, you will
probably notice that it is currently March.
That means that March Madness is just around the corner. I’ve had a year to relax in preparation for
this tournament, but I’ve been watching a lot of basketball so far this season
and I’m really curious about how this tournament will be played out. There doesn’t seem to be a really clear
front-runner in this year’s field, which makes it especially fun for me. Maybe we’ll get a repeat of last year, when a
#1 seed, 2 #4 seeds and a 9 seed all made the Final 4 and a #15 team made the
Sweet 16 This year it looks like we
might have an undefeated team in the pool (Wichita State). I am curious to see what people do with them
since they come from a mid-major conference and a lot of people were burned
with Gonzaga last year under somewhat similar circumstances.
For those that are getting into
the pool for the first time, let me give you a little introduction. I’ve been running this pool since 2006, and
it has grown every year, although with me recently changing jobs that may
change. In 2005, I put together a
spreadsheet so that I could tell if my entry in a pool had any chance of
winning (or what had to happen to keep me from being eliminated). After that, I figured I could provide that
type of information to anyone in a pool, as well as provide some rough
probabilities of winning at various stages of the tournament. Every year, I spend the first Thursday and
Friday at my brother’s place in front of 4 screens watching a ton of
basketball, eating bad food and scoring all of the entries. After the opening weekend, I am able to
generate preliminary probabilities of getting all of the payouts. I can also tell if and when entries are eliminated
from contention for the various payouts.
It makes it much more interesting than just figuring out who has the
most points at any particular time.
Changes
There are some changes to the
pool this year. The first involves
entering on-line. If you are going to
enter on-line (as described later), you MUST
send me an e-mail telling me which entries are yours and how you intend to pay
for them. I won’t even look at on-line
entries that are not claimed using this method.
The single worst part of running this pool is the bookkeeping around
entries. This way makes me job on that
front much easier.
Another big change is one that
people that entered my bowl pool will be familiar with. I stopped sending out personal e-mails and
started keeping a blog where I am writing all of the information that I would
have been emailing in years past. This
is easier and more convenient for me.
There is an icon on the site if you want email updates whenever I post
anything if you still like the email notification. The site is located at: http://kleisports.blogspot.
Who can Enter
Basketball fans… Fans of pools…. Anyone with five bucks….. Anyone can enter. Feel free to forward this on to anyone that
wants to enter. All are welcome as long
as they follow the instructions laid out here.
You can enter as many times as you want.
There is a 5-sheet limit if you enter on-line. There is no limit if you enter any other way.
How to Enter
There are a few ways to
enter. The easiest way is to print out a
bracket, fill it out and hand it to me.
I recently changed jobs so I no longer work at Pratt & Whitney. If you go by my desk, I’m pretty sure that it
will be vacant. However, if you want to
go the hard copy way, you can still give your sheets and money to Joe
Kallio. I’ll stop by at lunchtime on
Wednesday to pick anything up, so there’s a bit of a deadline if you go that
route.
You can fill out a sheet and send
me a scanned version. That works as
well. Just make sure that you let me
know how you are going to pay for it when you send me the sheet.
You can enter on-line via the
Yahoo fantasy games site. While you are
there, you can enter the perfect bracket contest for a chance at $1 Billion
dollars. That’s a nice bonus. The address for the entry is: https://tournament.
If you do enter on-line, it would
make my job a lot easier if you could export a PDF file of your entry and send
me a copy in advance. I have to
transcribe all entries into a spreadsheet to score them and run analyses. The way the on-line entries work, I can’t see
anyone’s picks until tip off of the first game.
Last year, it probably took me 4-5 hours to transcribe all of the
on-line entries. If I could get a jump
on that workload, it would make my Thursday morning much more enjoyable.
Play-in Games
I think this is a hidden value
and as these pools get bigger they may make a bigger difference to who
wins. There are 4 play-in games that go
off on Tuesday and Wednesday.
They call
them “1st round games”, but my cold, lifeless body will be 6 feet
underground before I call them that.
They are play-in games. Whatever
you call them, if you want to pick one of those teams to advance, you
essentially get whoever wins that game.
For instance last year, if you liked Boise State to advance to the Sweet
16, you still got points for La Salle advancing because La Salle beat Boise State
in the play-in game. I think that at
least one team from the play-in game has made the Sweet 16 the last 3 years and
VCU made it to the Final 4 as a play-in winner.
That’s a lot of points to leave on the table.
Tiebreaker
I never like deciding places via
a tiebreaker, but sometimes 63 games aren’t enough to determine who gets what,
so I need one. The tiebreaker is the
total points scored in the championship game.
If you enter on-line, there should be a place to put the score for each
team. The winner of the tiebreaker is
the entry that is closest to the actual number of points, regardless of whether
or not it is higher or lower.
How to pay
The cost is $5 per entry. There are no volume discounts or anything
like that.
There are a few ways to pay, but
I’ll accept most types of payment except for PayPal. I had everyone use that a few years back and
it got flagged for “suspicious activity”.
That seems so strange since I never use my Paypal account except for
about a week where I would receive a ton of activity in $5 increments. Anyway, I don’t use PayPal since I don’t want
my account frozen.
You can pay in cash. This will be harder since I switched jobs,
but if you are used to handing me cash, you can still pay Joe Kallio if you
work at Pratt in San Diego.
If you want to mail me payments or
set up a payment from your bank, here’s my address:
Klei Richards
2168 Carol View Dr. #B205
Cardiff, CA 92007
As I mentioned above, if you
enter on line, you MUST send me an email
claiming your entry and how you intend to pay for it.
Deadlines
The deadline for entry is tip off
of the first game on Thursday, March 20th.
Brackets will be released on Sunday, March 16th. The only exception to this is if you are
handing in a sheet and payment to Joe Kallio at Pratt & Whitney San
Diego. I’ll come by during lunch on
Wednesday, March 19th to pick up whatever he’s got. Anything submitted after that will have to
come through one of the other channels that I’ve outlined.
Scoring
The scoring is the same as it’s
been in years past. There will be 32
points available in each round for a total of 192 points in all. That means that every game you get right on
the opening Thursday and Friday will be worth 1 point, every game on the
opening Saturday and Sunday will be worth 2 pts. It also means that picking the Champion gets
you 32 points. With a pool as big as
mine has turned into, you almost certainly need to get the winner right to have
any chance at the money.
Payouts
Last year, I think I paid out 4
places. I said that if I managed to get
250 entries, I would pay out 5 places. I
pay out everything that I take in, so this whole escapade is charity work on my
behalf. If I pay out 4 places, the breakdown
will be: 1st – 50%, 2nd – 25%, 3rd – 10%, 4th
– 5%. If it turns out to be 5 places,
the breakdown will be: 1st – 45%, 2nd – 25%, 3rd
– 15%, 4th – 10%, 5th – 5%. I won’t know what the actual dollar amounts
will be until I know how many entries I have.
I think that more or less covers
everything. If you’ve read all the way
through this, congratulations!!! It’s a
bit of a long-winded message, but there’s a lot of information in there that
people have asked about in the past as well as things that have caused me grief
in the past. I hope everyone can
join. It promises to be a fun
tournament. I’ll be hoping for a ton of
upsets. That always makes for a fun
tournament. I don’t like it as much when
all the higher seeds win. I actively
discourage people from entering a bracket only by the seeds. My favorite day of the tournament is
selection Sunday, and my second favorite day is the day all gutless brackets
are mathematically eliminated from any money.
I really can’t stand those types of picks.
Good luck to everyone!!!!
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