Momentum. Add a star for 1 to 8 seeds with zero or one loss in the five games leading up to the tournament, and 9 to 16 seeds with two or more losses.
Value. Add a star using a formula based on the probability of winning and frequency of pick for all teams that compete for a slot.
Betting against Beta. Add a star to encourage picking lots of mild upsets rather than one longshot.
The last two factors depend on the size of the pool and so I show them as circles rather than stars. If you want to enter a national bracket challenge with millions of entries, circles count as stars. If your office pool has around 500 or more entries, you can count up to one circle as a star. In office pools under 500 people, ignore the circles.
You can start your selection from either end, meaning that you can pick a tournament winner and work backward, or pick all the first round winners and go forward. Generally, you should favor the team with the most stars for a given slot, but feel free to adjust if you think it might be better than the experts think, or that it might be picked less often in your pool than in typical pools.
To illustrate the use, if we start with the championship, we see only Duke, Michigan State, Gonzaga and Virginia are three-star picks for smaller pools. In somewhat larger pools, Michigan State becomes the only four-star pick, but Yale (!), Baylor, Texas Tech, Florida, Villanova, North Carolina, Ohio State and Iowa State become three-star picks. In a national pool, Yale, Michigan State, Baylor, Texas Tech, Florida, Villanova, Ohio State and Iowa State are the four-star picks.
