Rules

First, look at a copy of the bracket for this year's tournament.

Instead of filling out a complete bracket like you're used to doing in other pools, you just pick 8 teams out of the 64. Each team will get a score based on their seed and how well they do in the tournament. Then add up the scores of each of your teams to get your overall score. You may not pick the same team more than once, and you cannot enter more than one set of picks.

Note: play-in games do not count.

The general idea is still that if you pick an underdog that wins a couple of games, that's as impressive as picking a heavily favored team that goes to the Final Four.

You start by taking the number of wins the team gets, squaring it, and multiplying by (1 + the team's seed). IN ADDITION, teams that are seeded 10 through 16 will get a bonus added if they win at least one game, according to the following table:

The bonuses are designed to encourage picking worse-seeded teams.

Here are some examples so you can see how this works:

If Duke, a 3-seed, wins exactly 4 games in the tournament, they'll get (4*4)*(1+3) = 64 points. No bonus applies to 3 seeds, so that's the final score.

But if 10-seed Stanford wins exactly 2 games, they'll get (2*2)*(1+10) = 44 points, PLUS a bonus of 9 points for winning at least one game, for a grand total of 53 points. If a 10 seed wins exactly 1 game, they'll still get 11 + 9 = 20 points.

If you pick a 16 seed that wins 0 games, you'll get a 0. There is no bonus just for picking a team; the team must win at least one game.

Based on past years, it seems like it's important to pick better-seeded teams if they are going to win at least 3 games, or worse-seeded teams that win at least 2 games. Because of the bonuses, picking teams seeded 11 and higher will very likely pay off even if they only win 1 game.

Good luck!