The NCAA Tournament is Betting Christmas. Or, more appropriately since it carries on over multiple nights without a set date each year, Betting Hanukkah.
Either way, it’s an extended holiday for bettors, who get to see their first wagers of the day pay off by lunch time, depending on what time zone they’re in. The basketball gods are primed to grace our lives with 48 win-or-go-home games in four days. The first four days of the tournament are a betting buffet, with multiple options to sample and plenty of ways to fill up.
How you bet those games will determine whether your meal is a Golden Corral-style grime-and-dine or a prime rib and lobster spread. And, in the interest of helping you chomp down on college basketball’s high society, we’ve called in our biggest reinforcement.
When we last left our wagering spirit guide the Rhode Island Scumbag he was, well, not doing great. The stretch between Christmas and the Super Bowl created several opportunities to lay some “Locks of the Week” upon the betting world and he missed every. Single. One.
All told, he finished the year 7-21 when it came to those football locks. That’s a .250 average that would get him shuffled out of most major league outfields. But if you were wise enough to fade his advice, you would have finished the NFL season up more than 10 units.
He assures me he’s doing much better when it comes to college basketball, despite his possibly misguided faith in Wisconsin. Should you trust his advice? Should you once again default to fading his locks? I can’t say for certain, but I will admit the man has done his homework for the tournament. Specifically with the handwriting of an eighth grader.
If that pre-Vegas cheat sheet, presumably written with a LightSky in hand in his fifth hour of tending to a pork butt, makes sense to you, then you can appreciate the craft. If not, you can at least figure out which bets you *don’t* want to make. I set him up with a template, here’s what he gave me.
Because you deserve nothing but the best, here’s the Rhode Island Scumbag’s Guide to the opening weekend of the 2022 men’s NCAA Tournament.