Beating the system
March 6, 2007 2:44 pm by JuiceThere were a couple of good articles in the latest edition of The New York Times’s excellent if infrequent Play Magazine. Though there were a few short pieces about college basketball, none were about the Big East (well, one, if you count the feature on a UConn Women’s Basektball superfan).
However, How to Build a Prodigy describes the latest in what I would call “sports neurology”. Not everything is new here, but it’s a good summary of the past few years of research. And now I know that it’s too late to improve my jump shot, unless I want to make 5000 or more correct attempts.
If you’re still trying to determine your picks for our Big East Tourney Pick ‘Em Challenge (see below), you might want to check out For the Gamblers, 1+2=5. Key points:
Ignore seeds once they’ve been assigned. Just because a 12 seed often beats a 5 seed, this particular 12-seeded team didn’t get magical powers from the selection committee’s decision.
Don’t watch games. Counter-intuitive, but true. Not that this is going to stop you, but the more you watch, the more biased your opinion becomes. The article mentions the obvious fact that if you watch one team a lot, you’re going to be subjective. But memories are extremeley selective in general, and “The best handicappers are people who don’t watch games at all”. This leads to an interesting corollary: all the big pundits who make predictions are going to be wrong. (Has anyone done an analysis of how accurate ESPN writers’ picks are?) More interestingly, it also suggests that the NCAA selection committee, which uses a combination of statistics and watching tons of games, might do better by just using statistics. (Or having some kind of double-elimination tournament for all Div I teams.)
Trust Vegas. When it’s all about the money, rationality prevails over emotion.
The tournament never follows seed exactly, but it’s never that random either. Take small chances, but don’t pick your favorite Cinderella 16-seed to run the table.
Remember, it’s not too late to enter your Pick ‘Em brackets!
One Response to “Beating the system”
Also excellent is the new NYTimes blog on the NCAAs.
Tourney picking is sort of like stock-picking. There’s a fixed strategy (in stocks, picking the indexes) that will let you beat 2/3 of the hand-picked strategies. That fixed strategy, of course, is just to pick the higher seeds.
Of course, I don’t care about being above-average in NCAAs. I’d just like to brag one year that I got everything right. Whereas in stocks, being “merely” above-average is fine by me. That’s why I still make insanely crazy picks, like Nova over G’town.
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