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March Madness is one of the most exciting times of year for basketball. It’s when the NCAA Tournament happens each year. During this time, many companies and friends participate in a bracket pool, which is a competition where people try to predict the winners of each game of the tournament. These pools usually have various scoring methods, taking into account the “seed” of the team and the round of the tournament. Coming up with an optimized bracket to beat out opponents can be time consuming and frustrating. Genecab eliminates the guesswork behind creating an optimized bracket for your specific tournament rules.

How to Create Your Own Bracket Manually

So how does one win? Well, nothing is guaranteed. But you can give yourself the best opportunity to win with your picks. The first thing I started to do was to try to maximize my expected points. There are multiple ways to go about this. At first glance, it seemed to me like the best way to do it was to get the win probability of each matchup, multiply it by the points if that team won that game, and then try to mix up all of the picks to maximize the expected number of points. This can get complicated!

Let’s go through an example of a single game. Let’s say a number 11 seed team versus a number 6 seed team. And let’s say you’ve looked at the stats and calculated that the number 6 seed team has a 57% chance of winning that game in round 1. That means that if you guess the number 6 seed to win round one, you would multiply the chances of winning by 6. 6 * 57% = 3.42 expected points. Now how about the number 11 seed? If you pick the number 11 seed, the expected points is 11 * (100%-57%) = 4.73 expected points. If you didn’t have to consider subsequent rounds, the natural pick would be the number 11 seed, because it maximizes the expected points. One can repeat this process for all 32 games in round 1.

But what about the next round? In the next round, your number 6 or number 11 pick is going to be matched up with either a number 4 seed or a number 13 seed. And which one should you pick to win, the number 4 seed or the number 13 seed? And how do you calculate the expected points for this set of games for both round 1 and round 2? One should mix up all of the combinations for these 3 games and then maximize the expected points for those games. And then repeat this process for all games in round 2.

But what about round 3, the sweet 16? This is getting complicated! We need a computer to do this work for us! This is why I created Genecab. Genecab tries millions of combinations of brackets to maximize the expected profits against your competitors.

How Does It Work?

So how does all of this work? It works using machine learning algorithms and many data sources for estimating the probabilities. It takes into account team ratings from four different reputable sources of team ratings. It takes into account injuries, lost players or players taking a break, win probabilities, the scoring rules of your bracket pool, new teams, preseason games, winning streaks, and games throughout the season. It then runs all of this through a machine learning algorithm. It tries millions of combinations of brackets and then evaluates the expected profit against a theoretical pool of competitors.

Why Is This Different From All the Other Bracket Recommendations?

If you do a bracket online, you probably noticed that there are suggested ways of researching who will win a particular game. There are dozens of different methods of creating your bracket. So why is Genecab different? Genecab is different because it maximized the expected win probability based on the specific scoring rules of your bracket pool. Bracket pool scoring methods are custom for each pool. The seed can be added or multiplied, and the points for each round can be modified. Genecab takes these scoring rules into consideration. It doesn’t just pick the expected winner, it takes the scoring rules into account to get those expected points as high as possible.

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