Tag: BetFTW

March Madness 2023: Best bets (Auburn!) in the Midwest Region

One Texas team will advance while Xavier struggles against the spread

The Midwest Region of the men’s NCAA bracket looks almost too top heavy.

No. 1 seed Houston was at the top of the polls all season. No. 2 Texas was in a fight for the Big 12 regular season title all year (winning the conference tournament), and the rest of the region is mostly teams who came on strong down the final stretch of games.

So, of course, we should expect the unexpected here.

Bracket-busters like Penn State, Texas A&M and Kent State are lurking.

So who should you bet on to escape Kansas City en route to the Final Four in Houston, Texas?

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We’ve got you covered.

March Madness 2023: Best bets (Utah State!) in the South Region

An upset brewing for Missouri and banking Baylor in the South Region.

The South Region of the men’s NCAA tournament bracket is an absolute gauntlet.

Aside from No. 1 overall seed Alabama, there’s No. 4 Virginia, No. 3 Baylor, No. 2 Arizona and No. 6 Creighton lurking and ready to fight their way to the Final Four.

So how do you make sense of who to bet on in such a stacked region? We’ve got you covered.

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Here are three of the best bets you can make on 16 teams who will have to go through Louisville if they want to make it to the national championship in Houston.

Q&A: Reggie Miller predicts the team most likely to choke during March Madness

Reggie Miller on remembering Craig Sager every March, the silliest bets he made with his Pacers teammates and why one Indiana team should be worried this month.

There are few truer signs that March has arrived than Reggie Miller popping up in a Wendy’s commercial.

For the fourth consecutive year, Miller is the face of the Wendy’s March Madness ads, and as he continues to film the spots there becomes more of an emphasis on the “madness” portion behind the scenes. Sure there’s a script, but it’s more of a rough guideline.

“I would say it’s 70-to-75 percent is ad-libbed,” Miller said. “We just came up with it right then and we did it.”

So yes, when you see the NBA icon correcting a server on how to approach him or dancing his way around the set during every media break this month, that’s all Reggie.

Not that it should be a surprise at this point. Few players in basketball history have embraced the spotlight like the Hall of Famer.

“I started with like, the MC Hammer. I did the Running Man. I did the windshield wiper is like it was just silly,” Miller said of his dance moves. “We were just doing crazy stuff. The dancing is good, but it’s the timing of the reactions of the actors [Chris Kleckner, Bill O’Neil, Kathryn Feeney and Willie Earl Jr.]. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. It’s never a dull moment when we’re on set.”

Much like his fictional self in the commercials, Miller plans on spending all of March glued to his TV watching the bracket play out. And because he isn’t calling any of the tournament games he’ll get to watch as many of them as he pleases.

Miller spoke to For The Win ahead of the tournament to dish on his Final Four picks, which team is getting bounced early, the dumbest bets he made with his Pacers teammates and why he rocks Craig Sager Air Force 1s during March.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

4 potential first-round upsets for the NCAA men’s tournament, including 1 in each region

Let’s put a few teams on upset alert.

The odds of getting a perfect bracket in the NCAA tournament are so long that it’s practically impossible to do.

One of the things that makes it so hard is predicting all of the inevitable upsets. We know they’re going to happen. Oddsmakers know it too — there will always be Cinderellas. We just don’t know which teams fit the glass slipper yet.

So, let me preface everything to follow by saying, I don’t know either. Now that that’s out the way, these are my best bets for a first-round upset in each region. Please note, if the spread wasn’t at least more than a single bucket, I didn’t consider the game for an upset, regardless of seeds.

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March Madness: 3 men’s first-round upsets oddsmakers expect

These spreads disagree with the selection committee’s seeding

While there are tons of complaints from fan bases across the country over how the NCAA selection committee seeded the 68 teams in the men’s basketball tournament, it appears oddsmakers don’t have too many gripes with how the matchups turned out.

As early betting gets underway for the first round of the tournament on Thursday and Friday, only three lower-seeded teams are considered favorites on the moneyline and against the spread — and even then the difference is pretty marginal.

That is, of course, unless you’re trying to fill out a perfect bracket this year or pick the right team to wager on. Then these lines become pretty significant.

Two of the teams expected to pull off upsets are No. 9 seeds facing a No. 8. The other is a No. 10 seed that should give a fits to a No. 7 seed.

Here’s a look at the opening lines via BetMGM.

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Americans plan to bet $15 billion on the NCAA tournament, and they’ll waste much of it on Kentucky

There are better ways to blow your money.

Americans will bet a whole lot of money on the NCAA tournament this year. That’s not a surprise.

To be exact, 68 million American adults (26 percent) plan to wager $15.5 billion on the men’s tournament, according to a survey from the American Gaming Association.

More surprising is the team is receiving the majority of those bets.

According to the AGA, Kentucky leads the way with a 9 percent share of bets to win the national title. If you ever needed evidence of people blindly betting on name brands, here you go.

Yes, Kentucky is a blueblood program, but it isn’t national title good anymore. The Wildcats aren’t even ranked. They’re a 6-seed in the tournament, and only one of those has ever won the whole thing.

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This isn’t driven by homers either. Sports betting isn’t even legal in Kentucky. Nor is it legal in Texas, where the second most bet-on team resides.

Texas A&M — a 7-seed — is expected to receive 8% of bets, followed by Gonzaga, UCLA and Alabama at 6 percent each. Smells like a lot of wasted money on all but the last two to me.

According to the survey, 18 million more American adults plan to wager on March Madness compared to the Super Bowl, but they’re expected to spend about half a billion dollars less.

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5 bets to avoid during the 2023 NCAA men’s basketball tournament

A few pitfalls for bettors to avoid over the next few weeks.

Welcome to the Winner’s Circle, a weekly column by Bet For The Win senior writer Prince J. Grimes.

It’s the day after Selection Sunday, a wonderful time of year for bettors. So many games and teams to choose from.

We only have a day to figure out our favorite tournament bets before the First Four begins, but don’t be in such a rush that you fall into avoidable traps. There’s action that simply isn’t worth your time or attention.

To narrow down your betting options, I browsed the worldwide web for some trends to take heed to while betting on the NCAA tournament. These are the bets I would avoid:

Chalk throughout

This is self-explanatory and really doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway. Don’t just bet on all higher seeds to win. Upsets will happen, and that actually starts with the First Four teams.

In all but one year of the First Four, at least one of the at-large teams has advanced to the second round. So expect one of Pittsburgh, Mississippi State, Nevada or Arizona State to come through on the moneyline against a 6-seed.

A top-4 seed will also lose in the first round if past years are an indication, but picking which of the 13- to 16-seed moneylines to tail is a little trickier.

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A 15 over a 2

This is one upset you might be inclined to take because it’s happened once each of the past two years. But it’s actually not all that common. Before Saint Peter’s rode a win over Kentucky to a deep 2022 run and Oral Roberts beat Ohio State in 2021, a 15-seed hadn’t beat a 2 since 2016.

Before that, it had only happened seven other times in tournament history. This year, I’m expecting Arizona, Texas, Marquette and UCLA to all safely advance to at least the second round.

Public bets against the spread

According to Action Network, tournament teams that receive 60 percent or more bets against the spread have a 41.2 percent winning percentage ATS since 2016.

Simply put, when the public is incredibly convinced a team is going to cover, that team probably isn’t going to cover.

Longshot futures

Since tournament seeding began in 1978, only four teams with odds longer than 20-1 have won the title, with UConn in 2014 being the longest at 100-1.

That narrow’s this year’s field considerably if the trend holds. Only 10 teams have odds shorter than 20-1 at BetMGM: Houston (+550), Kansas (+800), Alabama (+800), Purdue (+1100), UCLA (+1200), Arizona (+1200), Texas (+1600), UConn (+1600), Gonzaga (+1800) and Baylor (+1800).

This stat also makes sense when you consider no team seeded higher than No. 8 has ever won the tournament.

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1-seed upsets

The teams that end up as 1 seeds got there for a reason. This year, that’s Alabama, Houston, Purdue and Kansas. Let’s not go betting on upsets over No. 1s just for the sake of it.

These teams will always be your safest bets to not only win each round, but also win the entire tournament. Since 1985, 24 of the 37 national champions have been 1 seeds — including 12 of the past 15 winners.

That’s not to say every 1 seed will advance to the Final Four; 2008 is the only year where each Final Four team was a 1-seed — like I said, avoid chalk. But there’s a pretty good chance one of the four top-line teams will end up as the last standing.

And that’s it from me. Happy March!

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5 Cinderella candidates (College of Charleston!) in the men’s NCAA tournament

Shine off those glass slippers, folks. Let’s head to the Big Dance.

The bracket for the 2023 NCAA men’s tournament is now live, so it’s time to dig into the matchups. Cinderella stories are always one of the best parts of postseason college basketball. Last season, Saint Peter’s charmed the nation on a dream run that took the small Jersey City school to the Elite Eight with wins over powerhouses like Kentucky and Purdue.

This year, the field of 68 feels more balanced than ever before, meaning we could be ripe for another double-digit seed making its way through the bracket.

Let’s take a look at some of the most likely candidates to become Cinderellas in 2023.

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March Madness: 5 bracket alternatives you need to try, from Calcuttas to confidence pools

From Calcuttas to box pools.

NOTE: We published this back in 2019!

Filling out a bracket for typical March Madness pools is an all-time classic activity and makes the NCAA men’s tournament infinitely more fun and interesting.

But it’s not the only game you can play involving the tournament.

As you’ll see from this list compiled below, there are a whole bunch of other ways to make your tourney experience more fun (and, if you play for money, potentially more lucrative) that involve picking games or the players involved in it. Some of them are bracket-based, but these will get you to think differently about how to strategize.

Here are a few I highly recommend:

1. Calcutta

This one isn’t for the faint of heart: You and a group of friends get together and bid on the teams involved in the tournament in an auction with real dollars. Every time one of your teams win, you get back a percentage of the pot that increases in each round. The hope is you make back more than you invested.

Let’s say you won the bid on an underdog who becomes a Cinderella year for only $50. You would have made some serious return on investment with that pick because they made it to the Final Four. On the flip side, if you bid a lot more to, say, get a No. 1 seed like Virginia and watch them lose to 16 seed UMBC, you lose a lot.

2. A 1 to 64 confidence pool

This was run by a friend of mine for years and it was mind-bending: Instead of picking the winners, you rank the teams involved 1 to 64. Every time a team wins, you get the amount of points in the ranking added to your total. So if Duke is your no. 10 ranked squad, you get 10 points every time they win. The wrinkle? You want the LOWEST score possible. So if there’s a sleeper 12 seed you think can win a couple of times, you’ll want to rank them in the middle of the pack. Think there’s a vulnerable No. 1? Send them down.

THE BRACKETS ARE BACK: The USA TODAY Sports Bracket Challenge is back. $1 MILLION grand prize for a perfect bracket.

3. Survivor pool

Similar to its NFL equivalent, you pick on team to win per day of the tournament, but you can’t use them again once you’ve picked a winning team. Win, and you move on, which can get tricky as the tourney gets tighter.

4. Fantasy leagues

You draft a team based on the players involved, which obviously can be tricky: Do you take a player who is talented but who might lose early?

5. Squares or Box pool

Just like the Super Bowl, you set up a 10 x 10 grid and numbers are randomly assigned to each column. You win money based on the final score of each game in the tournament if your box matches the final digits in each of the scores of a game. That means you could win multiple times throughout the entire tourney and payments can increase with each round.

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5 bracket alternatives to try during March Madness

From Calcuttas to box pools.

NOTE: We published this back in 2019!

Filling out a bracket for typical March Madness pools is an all-time classic activity and makes the NCAA men’s tournament infinitely more fun and interesting.

But it’s not the only game you can play involving the tournament.

As you’ll see from this list compiled below, there are a whole bunch of other ways to make your tourney experience more fun (and, if you play for money, potentially more lucrative) that involve picking games or the players involved in it. Some of them are bracket-based, but these will get you to think differently about how to strategize.

Here are a few I highly recommend:

1. Calcutta

This one isn’t for the faint of heart: You and a group of friends get together and bid on the teams involved in the tournament in an auction with real dollars. Every time one of your teams win, you get back a percentage of the pot that increases in each round. The hope is you make back more than you invested.

Let’s say you won the bid on an underdog who becomes a Cinderella year for only $50. You would have made some serious return on investment with that pick because they made it to the Final Four. On the flip side, if you bid a lot more to, say, get a No. 1 seed like Virginia and watch them lose to 16 seed UMBC, you lose a lot.

2. A 1 to 64 confidence pool

This was run by a friend of mine for years and it was mind-bending: Instead of picking the winners, you rank the teams involved 1 to 64. Every time a team wins, you get the amount of points in the ranking added to your total. So if Duke is your no. 10 ranked squad, you get 10 points every time they win. The wrinkle? You want the LOWEST score possible. So if there’s a sleeper 12 seed you think can win a couple of times, you’ll want to rank them in the middle of the pack. Think there’s a vulnerable No. 1? Send them down.

3. Survivor pool

Similar to its NFL equivalent, you pick on team to win per day of the tournament, but you can’t use them again once you’ve picked a winning team. Win, and you move on, which can get tricky as the tourney gets tighter.

4. Fantasy leagues

You draft a team based on the players involved, which obviously can be tricky: Do you take a player who is talented but who might lose early?

5. Squares or Box pool

Just like the Super Bowl, you set up a 10 x 10 grid and numbers are randomly assigned to each column. You win money based on the final score of each game in the tournament if your box matches the final digits in each of the scores of a game. That means you could win multiple times throughout the entire tourney and payments can increase with each round.

[mm-video type=video id=01gvcf927a2bznn4m027 playlist_id=none player_id=01gp1x90emjt3n6txc image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01gvcf927a2bznn4m027/01gvcf927a2bznn4m027-9bde47dbdccacfadbdb3af94826005a4.jpg]