Reddit mentions of How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool

Not entirely, one method I've read about is to wait until right before the first game (or if I really have to, wait until the Wed. night before, just to make sure I have time to get my brackets in properly). Anyway, what you're supposed to do is look at the percentages ESPN puts out of how often the teams get picked to advance to each round, and use that as your guideline.

Sure it'll be skewed a bit (perhaps QUITE a bit - we'll see after I try this), by 1) people who don't know anything about basketball and are just picking randomly, of which there are obviously numerous amounts, plus the fact that it's telling you what all the people who used ESPN did, not specifically the people I'm playing in my pool did. Nevertheless, it's still a PRETTY good way to judge IMHO. Then, you go and see what teams were projected to go to each round (via sites like fivethirtyeight.com or whomever else) and you choose your upsets out of the teams that are being "under-bet" on (in other words, if fivethirtyeight.com says - let's say Marshall, has a 30% chance of making the round of 32, but only 15% of people are picking them to do so, that's a good value upset to pick. Likewise, if people are picking Virginia to repeat as champions 24% of the time, but fivethirtyeight says they only have a 14% chance of doing so, they're being over-bet and aren't a good team to choose.

But then again, I also read that you NEVER want to pick a "front-runner" as your champion, because that means you're going up against a bunch of other people who also choose that top team, making your pick for champion essentially a "moot point" and then all your earlier picks play a much bigger part in whether or not you win, especially those early round picks, because there are so many of them (which I also read you shouldn't pick too many early round upsets, because each of them is only worth 1 point, and thus almost meaningless, whereas a mid-round upset is more risky, but wields much bigger rewards).

I'm only telling you all this because there's like a 99.9% likelihood that you aren't one of the people I compete against in the pool and thus you knowing all this can't directly hurt me and can only help you. Here's another piece of help you might want to invest ($10) in:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Your-NCAA-Tournament-Pool/dp/0998442305