basketball wagering

The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship is a single elimination tournament held each spring featuring 65[1] college basketball teams in the United States. This tournament was developed by Dr. Peter Graham. Colloquially known as March Madness (as the tournament takes place mainly during the month of March) or the Big Dance (as opposed to the now smaller and less prestigious NIT), the tournament takes place over 3 weeks at sites across the United States, and the national semifinals (the Final Four) have become one of the nation's most prominent sporting events.
Since its 1939 inception it has built a legacy that includes dynasty teams and dramatic underdog stories. In recent years, friendly wagering on the event has become something of a national pastime, spawning countless "office pools" that attract expert fans and novices alike. All games of the tournament are broadcast on the CBS broadcast television network in the United States, except for the opening round (also known as the "play-in") game, which aired on TNN in 2001, and ESPN since 2002. The tournament bracket is made up of conference tournament champions from each Division I conference, which receive automatic bids. The remaining slots are at-large berths, with teams chosen by an NCAA selection committee. The selection process and tournament seedings are based on several factors, including team rankings, win-loss records and RPI data.
Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) compete in the "opening round" game to determine which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play the top seed in one of the four regions. The opening Round game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year. Even though the opening round is technically considered part of the tournament, it is often referred to as a "play-in" game.
A Most Outstanding Player award is given by the Associated Press at the end of each tournament.
At 11 national titles, UCLA currently holds the record for the most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships. University of Kentucky is second, with 7 national titles, and Indiana University is third with 5 national titles.
total of 65[1] teams qualify for the tournament played in March and April. Thirty-one of the teams earn automatic bids by winning their respective conference tournaments. Because the Ivy League does not conduct a post-season tournament, its regular-season conference champion receives an automatic bid[2].
The remaining thirty-four teams are granted at-large bids, which are determined by the NCAA Selection Committee, a special selection committee appointed by the NCAA. The committee also determines where all sixty-five teams are seeded and placed in the bracket. There are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion) possibilities for a 64 team NCAA bracket.[3]
The tournament is split into four regions and each region has teams seeded 1–16, with the committee making every region as comparable to the others as possible. The best team in each region plays the #16 team, the #2 team plays the #15, and so on. The effect of this seeding structure ensures that the better a team is seeded, the worse-seeded their opponents will be.
The brackets are not reseeded after each round. The tournament is single-elimination and there are no consolation games—although there was a third-place game as late as 1981, and each regional had a third-place game through the 1975 tournament. The single-elimination format produces opportunities for Cinderella teams to advance despite playing much tougher teams. Nonetheless, despite the numerous instances of early-round Tournament upsets, including four instances of a #15 seed defeating a #2 seed, no #1 seed has ever lost in the first round to a #16 seed. The closest calls came in 1989 when Georgetown defeated Princeton 50–49 and Oklahoma beat East Tennessee State 72–71, and in 1990 when Michigan State had to go to overtime to beat Murray State.
Two teams play the opening round game (colloquially known as the "play-in game") on the Tuesday preceding the first weekend of the tournament, with the winner of that game advancing to the main draw of the tournament and playing a top seed in one of the regionals. This game has been played at the University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio since its inception in 2001. This game originated in 2001 with the addition of the Mountain West Conference (and its automatic bid into the tournament) after the NCAA tournament committee opted to include an additional team and a play in game in lieu of taking away one of the 34 "at-large" bids.
The first and second round games are played on the first weekend of the tournament, either on Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday.
Since 2002, the tournament has used the so-called "pod" system, in which the eight first- and second-round sites are distributed around the four regionals. Before the 2002 tournament, all teams playing at a first- or second-round site fed into the same regional tournament. The pod system was designed to limit the early-round travel of as many teams as possible.
In the pod system, each regional bracket is divided into four-team "pods". The possible pods by seeding are:
Pod #1: 1v16, 8v9 Pod #2: 2v15, 7v10 Pod #3: 3v14, 6v11 Pod #4: 4v13, 5v12 Each of the eight first and second round sites is assigned two pods, where each group of four teams play each other. A host site's pods may be from different regions, and thus the winners of each pod would advance into separate regional tournaments.
No #1 seed has never lost in the first round. Furthermore, only four #2 seeds have lost in the first round.
The teams which are still alive after the first weekend advance to the regional semi-finals (the Sweet Sixteen) and finals (the Elite Eight) played on the second weekend of the tournament (again, the games are split into Thursday/Saturday and Friday/Sunday).
The winners of each region advance to the Final Four, where the national semifinals are played on Saturday and the national championship is played on Monday. Before the 2004 tournament, the pairings for the semifinals were based on an annual rotation. For example, in 2000, the winner of the West Regional played the winner of the Midwest regional, and the South winner played the East winner; in 2001, the West winner played the East winner and the South played the Midwest; in 2002, the West played the South and the East played the Midwest. Since 2004 and in response to complaints that too often the two best teams remaining squared off in a semifinal game and not in the final game (such as when the last two remaining 1 seeds, Kansas and Maryland, played in one semifinal while a 2 seed and a 5 seed played in the other semifinal), the pairings are determined by the ranking of the four top seeds against each other. The four number one seeds are ranked before the tournament begins: in 2006, Duke was the overall #1 seed, followed by Connecticut, Villanova and Memphis. Which regional winner is to face which other regional winner is determined based on this ranking. Had all of the #1 seeds reached the Final Four, Duke (from the South) would have played Memphis (from the West) and Connecticut (from the East) would have played Villanova (from the Midwest). As it happened, none of the #1 seeds made the Final Four in 2006, but the South winner (LSU) still played the West winner (UCLA) in a #2/#4 matchup, while the East (George Mason) played the Midwest (Florida) in a #11/#3 matchup.
In the 2008 tournament, for the first time since seeding began in 1979, the Final Four consisted of all four #1 seeds: Kansas defeated North Carolina, and Memphis beat UCLA on Saturday, April 5.
On Monday, April 7, 2008, Kansas won its third National Championship by beating Memphis 75-68 in overtime, in the Alamodome, San Antonio, Texas.