Bracket advice: Don’t pick Kentucky
Game experts and numerologists agree the way to win your office bracket pool is to pick … against Kentucky?
With a perfect record (34-0) and even odds in Vegas to win the 2015 national championship at the Final Four on April 6, why not the Wildcats, who have a 34 percent chance of winning the title according to kenpom.com?
Easy — your odds of winning the bracket pool decrease when you pick with the majority. And in more than 65 percent of ESPN.com brackets completed early Wednesday, the majority speaks loud and clear with Kentucky winning it all.
ESPN said only 0.3 percent of brackets filled out — 11 million total — in their Bracket Challenge game last year picked Connecticut. Chances are, if you had the Huskies on the final line in your 2014 bracket.
Words from the wiser before your turn in that 2015 tournament winner before Thursday’s first game at 11:20 p.m. ET — embrace your inner contrarian.
“There are going to be lots and lots of people who have nearly identical picks to yours with Kentucky as the winner,” said Glenn Ellison, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Wall Street Journal. “So you’re only going to win if a very small number of things happen.”
Other favorites in large public pools like ESPN are top-seeded Duke, No. 2 seed Wisconsin and No. 2 seed Arizona.
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