EAST LANSING – What does a buck get you these days? A Michigan-based software start-up says an edge on your competition when filling out March Madness brackets. And don’t you want to dominate your office NCAA basketball tournament pool?
More than $9 billion was wagered on NCAA college basketball brackets last March, according to the American Gaming Association – and that doesn’t even include the $1 billion prize that business moguls Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert once offered to the public for the perfect bracket.
They did so because they understood the astronomical odds: Given 64 teams and 63 games, there are 9 quintillion possible combinations in a single bracket.
Enter East Lansing’s Supported Intelligence, which developed SmartBracket to demonstrate the capabilities of its distinctive Rapid Recursive technology, which was designed to make sequential decisions – where one choice affects the next – for business managers. Their technology can analyze all of those combinations in under a second.
SmartBracket is recasting the question: what if the goal isn’t to create a perfect bracket, but rather, a bracket that gives you the best statistical odds to defeat others in your pool? After answering a few questions on its website, users receive a bracket that’s tailored to their geography and other preferences (fans in Ann Arbor are more likely to pick the Wolverines to win a given game, for instance, than those filling out brackets in North Carolina).
What’s generated is a bracket that exploits such preferences to determine which underdog picks give the user the best statistical chance to win versus their competition. “The goal shouldn’t be to select every team correctly, it ought to be which picks give you the best odds to defeat those who are in your pool,” said Jeff Johnson, COO of Supported Intelligence. “SmartBracket singles out those incremental advantages,” he said.
In last year’s trial run, SmartBracket placed in the 99th percentile nationally after the round of 64, and above the 75th percentile in every round before the Final Four. “Our goal was to best the brackets of both President Obama and ESPN basketball maven Dick Vitale in head-to-head contests,” said Neal Anderson, the software’s lead developer, “and we did just that.”
SmartBracket finished the tournament ranked third or better in 76 percent of simulated pools and was the winner 48 percent of the time.
This year, it’s ready for the public. Registration costs $1 and will open soon at www.smartbracket.io. Brackets will be generated from March 13, when the tournament field is set, until tip-off of the first game on March 17.
Supported Intelligence, LLC is a Michigan-based company, headquartered in East Lansing and formed in 2012. The firm’s primary product, the Rapid Recursive® Toolbox, was developed exclusively in the Midwest between the firm’s offices in East Lansing and Chicago by graduates of Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan. More information about the Rapid Recursive® Toolbox, including free trial downloads, can be found on the firm’s website, www.SupportedIntelligence.com
This column was written by Peter J. Schwartz of Supported Intelligence
