It was an exciting first weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament! While the number of upsets as defined by an 11 or lower seed beating a higher seed was below the average since 1985, there were some great games. We decided to be generous and count any lower seeded team beating a higher seed as an upset. The discount in our March Madness special stands at 22%! Should you buy now or wait?
I’ve updated the March Madness decision analysis model to reflect the rounds of 64 and 32 winners by controlling branches in the tree.
For the remainder of the tournament, an upset is defined as a 7 seeded team or lower beating a higher seeded team. The model with the controlled branches has 12,289 paths and can be analyzed using an exact method in about a tenth of a second (I used fast sequence evaluation). The updated Policy Tree is below.
Click here for the updated model. Once again, put your own probabilities in if you’d like but either way time is running out to take advantage of our March Madness special!