NCAA March Madness 2011 Recap

I finished 27-38-2 or 42% against the spread (ATS) -- my first sub-50% performance in 4 years of applying my Gibbs-Gipp system to the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Over 4 full years from 2008 through 2011, I am 129-125-5 or 50.8%.

I should admit that just by picking favourites in every NCAA tournament game for the past 4 years, you would have finished ahead of me every year and would be sporting a 138-116-5 or 54.25% record for 2008 through 2011.

Lady G vs. President Obama
President Obama picks winners straight-up with no point line for each bracket and round.
www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/brackets_2011.pdf

He had a tough time the past two years with none of his final 4 picks coming through. But, when he picked upsets in the early rounds, I could identify games where Lady Godiva and the Baracketer-in-Chief disagreed. In Obama's first 3 years in office, I am 9-19 womano-a-mano against the Baracketer. I won 5-3 in 2009, but the President can boast that he defeated Lady G 6-2 last year and 10-2 this year.

And, speaking of mano-a-womano, kudos to the President for also picking the women's NCAA brackets.

Lady G's System

I myself take no interest whatsoever in American college basketball, but toy boy fiancé Archibald can't get enough roundball. Every year he organizes a friendly, non-profit office pool for the NCAA men's tourney. Instead of picking bracket winners, the object of his pool is to pick winners against the point spread each and every day as the tournament unfolds. The winner of his winner-take-all pool is the contestant who picks the most winners against the spread over 64 matches. All matches are weighted equally starting with the play-in game to determine the 64th team.

To humour Archibald, I participate by relying on economists' studies showing that "heavy" underdogs win more than their fair share of college basketball games against the point spread, while "non-heavy" overdogs win slightly more than 50% (although this particular result is not statistically significant).

http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/print/179073423.html