So what's all this “March Madness” about? It’s the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the biggest thing there is in sports betting. The best and brightest from Division I are gathering in arenas across the United States, 68 teams all told, in a single-elimination tournament to decide the national champions of college basketball. The “First Four” play-in round has already wrapped up in Dayton, so we’re down to 64 teams – the perfect size for your March Madness bracket.
More on those brackets in a moment. First, there are all the other ways you can bet on March Madness. You can go to the NCAAB futures market and pick a team to win the whole Tournament, or just one of the four Regions (East, West, Midwest and South) on the bracket. You can also make one of the classic single bets (spread, moneyline, and total) on any of the remaining games. For an extra-big payout, you can parlay up to 12 of these single bets. You can even parlay the spread and the total from the same contest.
Live and In Color
You can’t have March Madness without props. Which team will score first? Will the game go into overtime? Proposition bets like these have become incredibly popular during the Super Bowl, and the Tournament props market will only get busier with each passing round, all the way to the National Championship Game on April 3 in Glendale.
Best of all, you can make these March Madness bets before and during the game. Live betting is available for every game, so you can play along while you watch the action, at home or on the go. You can bet instantly on things like which team will score the next 3-pointer, or whether UCLA’s star point guard Lonzo Ball will make his next shot.
The Big Dance
Okay, back to those March Madness brackets. The concept is simple: Pick a winner for every game. Everyone who wants in pays an entry fee, and the people who make the most correct picks get to split the prize pool. It’s virtually impossible to get all of them right – your chances are one in 9.2 quintillion. But you probably won’t need to nail every pick to win. You just need to do better than the competition.
The same goes for all the other March Madness bets out there. If you find the right places to zig while everyone else is zagging, your chances of winning increase. That usually means finding the right Cinderella story to follow. It’s often a No. 11 or No. 12 seed, a conference champion that people don’t usually get to see on television, playing a big-name program that had a so-so season, and had to settle for an at-large bid. So who does the glass slipper fit this year?