The NCAA Tournament has arrived, and it’s full-on bracket season. Millions of Americans are filling out brackets for the men’s and women’s tournaments, and in all likelihood, so are you. Maybe you’re filling out more than one. You might have your chalk bracket, your random bracket, your upset bracket, your mascot bracket or your analytics bracket. All of them work. Whatever your system is, it’s yours.
But then again, maybe you want something a little different. Maybe you’re getting tired of the traditional bracket. Or maybe your thirst for more NCAA madness knows no bounds, and you need a new game to switch things up.
You get what this is leading up to: We’re breaking down some non-bracket pools you could create or join to give the whole March Madness thing a different — even fresher — feel.
Survivor pool
Survivor pools are more commonly associated with weekly NFL picks, but nothing is stopping you from creating one for the NCAA Tournament. These pools seem to be picking up in popularity recently.
You pick one team per tournament day, and if your team wins, you advance on to the next day. If your team loses, you are out. Sounds simple? Not so fast.
You can only pick a specific team once, so if you go with Connecticut in the first round as a safe bet to advance to the next day, you cannot pick Connecticut again as long as you are in the pool. Keep in mind the field halves every round, too, so your pool is constantly shrinking.
The last person standing at the end wins. If you think this game sounds simple, it isn’t. We ran a Survivor pool at The Athletic last year, and the competition among eight people was over before the opening weekend concluded. (Thanks mostly to Missouri losing to No. 15 seed Princeton in the second round).
One strategy to keep in mind for Survivor is that you have to have a team available to use even if you’re still alive. There are only 16 teams in the Sweet 16, but only eight teams play on each day so the pickings get slim pretty quickly.
Calcutta
Calcutta brings an auction element into the mix and can produce some big payoffs depending on how your auction goes or how wisely you invest.
The basic premise is simple: Every team in the tournament is available for auction and goes to the highest bidder. If you win the bid for a team ($1,200 for North Carolina … sold!), that is your team for the tournament. Every win along the way gives you a percentage of the total pool.
Some pools do this by auctioning off the teams in seed-by-seed order (the No. 1s, followed by the No. 2s and so on), some do it by region (Midwest, South, East, West) and some do it totally at random. It is your pool, and you can do it how you want.
Some Calcutta pools also group the lowest-seeded teams (14, 15 and 16) into one group, so if you end up getting them, you actually have an investment in multiple teams instead of just one.
The beauty of a Calcutta pool is you have no idea how much the final pot will be because the higher the bids, the higher the pot.
It is also not a winner-take-all format. Each game in the pool produces a payoff, so there is a lot of strategic play involved.
If you snag a No. 11 or a No. 12 seed for a cheap price and it goes on a surprising run into the Sweet 16 (or further) with a couple of upsets, you might end up getting a big reward on a smaller investment.
There is also an element of chaos to the bidding where players might get desperate to try and secure ownership of one of the favorites and a No. 2 or 3 seed ends up going for a higher price than a No. 1 seed. It’s an auction. Anything can happen.
Upset pool
Another fun variation is the upset pool, in which teams are split evenly among a group of players, and points are collected with each win — the lower the seed, the more points you get.
For example, if you have a No. 10 seed that wins its first-round game, you get 10 points. If you have a No. 1 seed, you get one point, and so on. You can also add multipliers for each round. So a first-round win would simply be the number of the seed multiplied by one (No. 10 seed multiplied by one point for the first round equals 10 points). A second-round win would be multiplied by two, and then increasing each round.
This makes which teams you pick strategically way more valuable. A No. 2 seed is twice as valuable as a No. 1 seed in terms of payouts.
For each point you earn, everyone else pays you 10 cents per point. Be careful: Even with only 10 cents per point, the winners will take home roughly $60-70, while the losers could be down $50-60, depending on how poorly they drafted.
These pools work best with four, eight or 16 people so that teams are divided up evenly.
Shoutout to Chris Ryba for making this template for Upset pools. We set it up so you can open it on Google Docs and hit File –> Make a copy.
There is another variation that goes along with this: The upset-assassin pool. In this version, players would not only get points for winning their individual matchup in each round but, if an upset occurs, also steal the points of the team they defeated in each round.
Example: You have a No. 10 seed that wins its first-round matchup, giving you 10 points. In the second round, you go up against a player with a No. 2 seed that won its first-round game to collect two points. If the No. 10 seed ends up winning that game, the player not only gets their points for winning the matchup, but they would also steal the points already accumulated by the opponent (in this case, two points by going up against a No. 2 seed) to add to their total. If the No. 2 seed wins, that player gains four points (a 2-seed multiplied by the second round), but the No. 10 seed keeps its points.
These are just a few of the more popular ways to add a unique twist to your annual March Madness pools.
(Photo credit: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
