Happy March Madness Week, everyone! Don’t tell your kids, but we all know this is the actual best week of the year. We’ll have cinderellas and buzzer beaters in mere hours, but the most enjoyable part of it all is winning our big bracket competitions. You may be of the impression that your niece has the same odds of winning as the degenerate who watched multiple games every night of the year, but that frankly isn’t the case. Sure, sometimes a random entry will get lucky, but over the course of a larger sample size, the entrants who minimize potential pitfalls and maximize their expected value will come out on top much more often than the average bracket.

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you all that this is a guarantee. Chances are, you’ve got 55 or even 255 brackets to beat out. Even the best March Madness minds will lose more often than not, but if your contest has 55 competitors, that means the average person will win in just 1 out of 55 years. That is just a 1.8% of chance of cutting down the proverbial nets. What if I told you I could double those odds or even triple them with a simple math trick? That I can guarantee.

You see, it isn’t that we know what will happen, of course, but predictive rankings models are the most reliable metric we can use to assume the strongest teams. It isn’t their seed, strength of coaching, past tournament success or even which team came in hot. Rather, remove all the narratives and just look at the pure numbers. If you haven’t watched a single game, that’s ok. Efficiency metrics are multiple times better than the eye test of an amateur, or frankly, the eye test of the selection committee.