How to Bet 2018 March Madness

If you thought that betting on the Super Bowl was immense, you should take a look at the sports betting that takes place for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament each year — known as “March Madness.” In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars that people wager with the legal sports books each year, people enter bracket pools in their workplaces — costing as much as $1.7 billion in worker productivity during the month, according to estimates. People are expected to put as much as $3 billion on the line for this tournament — so if you’re going to join in, you should take a look at some ways to make some money with the upcoming NCAA Basketball tournament odds.

How to Bet 2018 March Madness

Rhode Island moves into the Top 5 of the RPI:https://t.co/jqCslwiSJW pic.twitter.com/l0k7jR3uEO

— NCAA Stats (@NCAAStats) February 14, 2018

Not all favorites are equal

With a betting event like this, you get a lot of members of the general public who don’t follow college basketball all year long and are just filling out brackets to take part in the fun. They don’t do their research, and they don’t know the ins and outs of each team’s path to the tournament. So they’re more likely to pick favorites blindly, instead of considering each matchup. How can you take advantage of this? Look at the winners of the conference tournaments. Often they’ve had to win three or four games to get the trophy. How much wear and tear did they take along the way? Many times, a favorite who got upset in the conference tournament will go farther in the Big Dance because they have more energy (and more motivation after taking that upset).

The NCAA game is different than the NBA

Thanks to the success of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors, professional basketball has become more like a video game than the traditional halfcourt sport that it has been for decades. Teams load up on scorers and try to get up and down the court as fast as they can. Sometimes they can show some grit on defense and get big stops, but the focus is on scoring, not stopping the opposition. In the college game, the emphasis is still on defense and rebounding. The shooters aren’t as good in the college game, so you can’t rely on a steady diet of three-balls to carry you to the next round. You have to be able to get rebounds and stops, and you have to be able to weather stretches when your own team can’t seem to buy a bucket. Teams that can get stops and get rebounds will generally go farther.

Defense on the perimeter is key

Again, in the NBA, the perimeter is all about who can get to the rim or who can drop shots from downtown. In the NCAA, the best backcourt players can lead the offense without turning the ball over and can get steals from the opposition. In the NBA, the speed of the game is fast enough to make this defensive efficiency less important. In the college game, though, those key strips can turn the momentum of a game in the blink of an eye.

What about “home” games?

The majority of NCAA tournament games are played in neutral sites. However, the top seeds often get early games in or near their home city, so their fans can pack the arenas. So if Kansas is a top seed and is playing in nearby Kansas City, or if Duke is playing in Charlotte, or if Villanova is playing at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, that’s essentially a “home” game for them. And yes, the oddsmakers realize that when they set the odds. Don’t forget to check how “neutral” some of these games are.

5 vs 12

Five-seeds have a 63% winning percentage over 12-seeds since 1985. Since 1988, at least one 12-seed has won an opening round game. Why? The five-seeds are often Power Five teams that didn’t win their conference but still played well. Twelve-seeds are often mid-majors who feel (and perhaps rightly so) that the seeding committee didn’t honor their season properly. So you have an upset brewing there.