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Want to get involved in i of the all-time fan traditions in all of sports? Welcome to the official bracket game of March Madness — for both the men'southward and women's tournament.

What is a subclass game?

Want to bear witness you're the basketball guru of the function or family? Want to meet if your canis familiaris can tell the time to come? That's where a subclass game comes in.

The NCAA Division I men'southward and women's basketball tournaments both start with a subclass of 64 teams. Before the games begin, you can attempt your hand at predicting the winner for each one of the 63 games. Your methodology is entirely up to yous, whether that's taking a deep dive into the statistics, flipping a coin, or having your canis familiaris brand picks for you.

Then, sit down back and watch the madness unfold as you revel in victory, or witness your bracket become busted before the first weekend.

As the games progress, you'll get points for every winner y'all picked correctly. Those points increase every circular (games in the second round are worth twice as much as games in the start round, and so on). At the finish of the tournament, the player in each group with the well-nigh points wins that grouping.

How to play

You can sign upwards for both the men'south and women's Bracket Claiming games here.

Important dates

Today: Sign upward!

You can sign upward for the Men's and Women'southward Bracket Challenge games right now, by going to this site. If you are a returning user, you can sign in using your email, or with an Apple, Facebook, or Google account. If you have forgotten your password, click the 'Problem Signing In?' link, where you can reset your password, or get a magic link to sign in directly.

If you lot are a new user, y'all can sign upwards for a Play account using your e-mail, or with an Apple, Facebook or Google account. You can apply the business relationship to play the Men'due south Subclass Challenge game, or the new Women's Subclass Challenge game and Starting Lineup Claiming.

All games will go alive on Selection Sunday, March 13th.

Dominicus, March thirteen: Selection Lord's day

On this mean solar day, the selection committee will reveal the 68 teams that fabricated the tournament's field and the terminal bracket for both tournaments. One time they are appear, brackets will open up for picking for the first fourth dimension.

Th, March 17 (men) and Friday, March 18 (women): Kickoff round starts

The beginning games of the showtime rounds will outset on these days —  the men on Th and the women on Friday. Correct before the first games tip off, bracket picking will lock, and you won't be able to alter any picks in your subclass for the remainder of the tournament. Don't get caught with an incomplete subclass earlier and then.

Sunday, April 3 (women) and Mon, Apr four (men): Championship game

The national championship games volition be played on consecutive nights. Afterwards each tournament concludes, the scores for both Bracket Claiming games will be final.

Desire a trivial more than history about NCAA tournament brackets?

Allow'southward offset with the basics.

Where practise brackets come up from?

According to Slate, the very first bracket in a sports tournament came in 1851, at a chess tournament in London. With the city hosting the Neat Exhibition for British applied science, English language chess primary Howard Staunton set out to organize the world's kickoff international chess tournament.

In club to whittle the 16-player field down to 1 winner, Staunton decided to brand eight pairs, with the losers of each existence eliminated from contention. Instead of seeding players to decide pairings (like the mod NCAA tournament), Staunton had each draw a random lot.

RELATED: What is March Madness: The NCAA tournament explained

"Eight white tickets and 8 yellow ones numbered respectively, 1, 2, 3, 4, v, 6, 7, viii, were put into the ballot-box," Staunton wrote in a book on the tournament. "Whoever drew No. 1 of the white tickets had to play with the political party who drew No. 1 of the yellowish… and so on throughout."

After the first circular, the eight winners drew tickets once more for fresh adversaries, all the way to the championship friction match.

"The manner adopted for pairing the combatants, will, it is hoped, bring the two best players in the Tournament into standoff for the chief prize."

Staunton's first bracket vicious short of achieving that goal, but we'll get to that in a minute.

Why is it called a bracket?

It's a fairly uncomplicated explanation: The shape of sports brackets highly resemble those of the punctuation symbols also known as brackets: ] [ and { }.

Just wait at the subclass from Staunton's 1851 chess tournament:

Sure, that doesn't await much similar a mod bracket (since second-round matchups in his tournament were decided by cartoon new lots, merely first-circular matchups were listed), but you can certainly see why information technology would be called a bracket.

How does the NCAA tournament bracket work?

Before we become into the specifics, let'southward take a look at what the mod NCAA Division I men's basketball championship subclass looks like (and hither'south a PDF):

While the NCAA tournament bracket can likely trace its origin back to the 1851 chess tournament, a few problems that arose in that tournament helped shape the NCAA tournament bracket differently.

Afterward the chess tournament, Staunton admitted that there were a lot of complaints about the random drawing, with some players getting much easier routes through the tournament based on multiple lucky draws, and acme players being paired against each other in the get-go round, forcing i to be eliminated very early on — two problems that are non conducive to a properly competitive or entertaining tournament.

The modern NCAA tournament bracket solves these two complaints in two ways.

First, it seeds all teams based on their skill level. Seeding is an official ranking compiled past the tournament'southward Option Commission — a 12-member grouping of schoolhouse and briefing administrators responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field. The results of this process are made public when the tournament bracket is released  on Selection Sunday. There are two types of seeding in the modern tournament.

• Offset is the region seed, which is most often what people are referring to when they mention a team'southward seed. The NCAA tournament bracket is split into four regions that correspond to the locations in the The states where the opening rounds are played: East, West, Midwest, and South. Each region has 16 teams, which are each ranked 1 (the highest) through 16 (the lowest).
• Second is the overall seed, which ranks each of the 68 teams in the tournament one (the highest) through 68 (the lowest). This is used to assistance decide which seeds are placed in which regions. For fairness, the commission tries not to place the best 1 seed in the same region as the best two seed, so on.

This process serves to reward teams that performed better in the regular season with easier routes to the championship and also spreads the best teams throughout the subclass so that no region is unfairly lopsided and competition is as fair as possible.

Second, instead of having teams redraw for new competition after every round, the NCAA tournament bracket'southward advancement is fix earlier whatever team plays. All potential matchups in all rounds are established clearly before the first game tips off.

The NCAA tournament is a single elimination bracket, significant teams are eliminated from the tournament later a unmarried loss. Win or get dwelling house. Other sports tournaments employ multiple-emptying brackets. For example, the College World Serial is a double-elimination tournament, where teams are no longer in the running for the title afterwards they lose two games.

Finally, the electric current NCAA tournament has 68 teams. 8 of the everyman-ranked teams play in the Showtime Four — eight games played before the first round of the tournament to narrow the field down to 64. From in that location, the subclass is very straightforward, with six rounds played, each one cutting the field in half until in that location is a champion.

For a little more background, let's take a quick look at how the NCAA men'due south basketball tournament field is compiled.

Teams have two ways to earn an invitation to the tournament field:

An automatic bid is awarded to whatsoever squad that wins its briefing tournament championship. In that location are 32 of these available.

An at-large bid is awarded to whatsoever team called past the Selection Committee for its performance during the season. The Selection Commission looks at a wide range of statistics, from strength of schedule to the newly released NET rankings. But there is no set formula for which teams receive an at-big bid. Even a team ranked No. 1 in the AP Poll is not guaranteed an invitation.

When did brackets go pop?

The public didn't always scramble to fill out brackets and join March Madness pools every March. In fact, information technology'south a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of the tournament.

The NCAA tournament'southward bracket was volatile through much of its first half-century, with the format and number of teams irresolute multiple times throughout, leading to some brackets that were far from user-friendly. For instance, in 1959, the tournament consisted of 23 teams, with nine receiving first-round byes. That certainly limits the appeal to the casual fan.

Furthermore, in the 1960s and 70s, UCLA won 10 championships in a menstruum of 12 years. At that place wasn't much thrill in picking a bracket when everyone knew who was going to win information technology. In 1975 — what would be UCLA's last championship of that run — the tournament expanded from 25 to 32 teams. In 1985, the tournament made another huge bound, from 53 teams to 64, adding more games and more chances for upsets.

According to the Smithsonian, the first bracket pool started in 1977 in a Staten Isle bar, where 88 people filled out brackets and pitted them against each other's. They were on to something. In 2018, tens of millions of brackets were filled out through major online subclass games, and while information technology'south incommunicable to count the number of paper brackets filled out offline, information technology wouldn't exist unreasonable to assume that grouping also ranks in the millions.

And every ane of those millions of brackets has one goal: To be perfect.

What are the odds of a perfect bracket?

That's tough to say exactly, but we'll get two things out of the manner speedily. One, no one has ever filled out a verifiably perfect men'south bracket in the history of the modern NCAA tournament. Two, no one likely ever will, because the odds are infinitesimally small. So astronomically small that in reality they're practically zero. Let's have a await.

Nearly all NCAA tournament brackets disregard the Starting time Four and only option games starting with the first circular. Since there are 64 teams in those brackets, the most basic calculation is the number of possible outcomes for 63 games picked randomly. That would be 2 (the number of potential winners for each game) to the 63rd power (the number of games in the bracket). More merely, that's two times 2, 63 times, which is equal to roughly 9.2 quintillion.

For reference, if you lot filled out 1 billion random brackets every single 2d for 100 straight years, y'all would still be vi quintillion brackets shy of 9.2 quintillion.

But that only applies if every game is a coin flip. In practice, there's a lot of information that usually goes into picking brackets. The most bones is seeding, which nosotros discussed earlier. Since every squad is seeded 1-16 in its region — with the highest-ranked team receiving a 1 seed, and the lowest a 16 — fifty-fifty someone who has no basketball knowledge at all can make a somewhat educated estimate on which team is favored in each matchup.

The belatedly DePaul professor Jeff Bergen bankrupt downwardly the odds for someone making informed decisions for each game and came up with odds of i in 128 billion. Much better that ane in nine quintillion for sure, but all the same well-nigh so depression as to be negligible.

If every single person in the U.Southward. had the basketball knowledge Bergen accounted for, and each filled out a subclass, the chance that i of those would be perfect is less than 0.25 pct.

What's more, a lot of the calculations for perfect brackets assumed that the 1-vs-16 matchup was an automatic win for the i seed, since earlier 2018, a i seed had never lost to a 16 seed in the history of the tournament. Since UMBC showed that upset was possible terminal twelvemonth, the odds of a perfect subclass merely got even worse. Lamentable.

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Source: https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2022-03-01/how-play-official-march-madness-bracket-challenge-games

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