Bracket fallacy #1

I wanted to take a quick few minutes to point out 1 common bracket fallacy and also give you a positive piece of advice to go with it. I'll have a couple more posts in the vein this week.

Bracket Fallacy #1 - Upsets happen, so you have to pick upsets to win
There are valid reasons to pick upsets, but this isn't one of them. Inevitably you'll hear someone tell you something like "typically at least one 12-seed beats a 5-seed during each tournament" (12s have won 32% of the time against 4s), so you'd better pick a 12 in there somewhere!" If you look at those numbers though, you're twice as likely to be right when picking a 5 as you are when picking a 12. 5s are usually just flat out better basketball teams.

We can actually calculate some odds on this:

Your odds of being right picking all #5s: 68% * 68% * 68% * 68% = 21.4%
Your odds of picking 3 #5s right AND a #12 right: 68% * 68% * 68% * 32% = 10.1%

The reality it's more likely the 5s will sweep this year than it is that you'll pick just the right 12 seed. In fact, what often happens is your 12-seed pick loses while another one wins meaning you've now lost 2 of the 5/12 match-ups. Now there are plenty of cases where a 12 is a valid pick on it's own (see Wisconsin and Arizona), but never pick an upset just for the sake of picking an upset. I see it all the time and you're really shooting yourself in the foot. Predicting that upsets will happen during March Madness and predicting which upsets will happen are completely different things.