Sunday, March 14th, 2010...11:55 pm
Enter The Madness: L-Hoops Invitational = Tourney Pool
In a shocker to nobody, I’m running a March Madness pool for the 22nd year in a row. I’ve gone from multiple highlighters, a calculator and photocopies in my formative youth, to an obscure bracket software program that still boggles Bwetty’s mind, to clicking one button on Cbssports.com Bracket Manager tool. Yes, machines are taking over…
You can join by clicking here. The password for the group is “redmen”.
I jacked up the price by $5 to $25 per entry with a maximum of three brackets each. The additional five spot will go to charity so we, or at least I, can feel better about how much time is spent in Bracketville over the next few weeks. If I can get over 100 participants, that would add up to a nice little chunk of philanthropy. I’m leaning towards contributing to Donorschoose.org as well as a few micro loans at Kiva.
The scoring rewards first round upsets (Add Seed scoring) and tilts heavily towards those who pick the winner. You can check out the rules here.
For those who need some help filling out their brackets check out this article I wrote about “bracket optimization” back in 2004 when I was at CSTV. Despite the faulty formatting, the article is well known in many academic circles as it introduced the Law of Probably Differentiation.
I’ll be checking out the action in Providence at the Dunkin Donuts Center. It’s a new city that we haven’t hit up before and the draw is a good one highlighted by a potential 2nd round match-up between Georgetown and Tennessee. We also get to see Saint Mary’s, one of my favorite mid-major teams (thanks to their Australian pipeline) over the last few years. And of course, in Kafkaesque fashion, we get Villanova for the 4th straight year. They’re 6-0 with me in the building…if only I grew up with an unhealthy obsession for a different small Big East catholic school I would be living a much more satisfying life.
FYI, stay tuned as I might try to do a podcast on the tournament if I can find somebody who is as perverted as me when it comes to college hoops. I also will try to organize “PLAYA POOL SON” with a Wednesday night AIM auction draft.
