For more than thirty years, some friends and I have done brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament that have been fun and very competitive. The approach involves picking winners (as usual) and assigning points to their victories (i.e. from 1 to 63 for each of the 63 games but not including the added "play-ins"). Each number from 1 to 63 can be applied to only one game. Upset picks during the first round get double points, picking the winner of the regional finals also gets double points, semi-final winners get three times the points placed on the wining team and the winner of the final gets 4 times. Once a picked team loses, all the points from that game and any subsequent games it was picked to win are lost. (Example: picking Purdue, because it is the lower seed, to beat Cincinnati and placing 9 points would produce 18 points if Purdue wins. Putting 63 points on Kentucky to win the final game would produce 252 points if they win that game.) Four of us played for more than thirty years, averaging about 1500 points per year with the overall difference between the best and worst of the floor for totals with over 45,000 points being only about 500 points. We played for bragging rites, but one could also put money on points. Go Irish.
