March Madness

The best time of the year for college sports is only a couple of hours away! Along with this being a great time for college sports it is also a great time for “office pools,” one of my favorite times of the year, with all day action Thursday through Sunday. This year I decided to approach my pools in a little different manner. Normally I enter around 5 different pools, and somewhat change my picks for each entry. Not this year, I decided to go for the scoop. I am in 5 different pools, with a total 8 entries (entered 3 of them twice). I used the same bracket for all of them, then with minor changes later in the tournament for my second entries.

This is the second year of the “poker office pool,” last year we wanted to do a $500 entry but could only get a handful of people, so we changed it to 300, and stuck with that number again this year, and quickly got 20 entries. This is the biggest buy in I am in, by almost 10 times any of the others. But as is the way with poker players, enough is never enough. Midday Wednesday, I get an email titled, “overs.” In the poker world an over is when some people at the table play for higher stakes than everyone else at the table by using “over” buttons, to show they are playing higher, an example would be at a 30-60 table, some people would be playing 60-120. So the banter began, and by late Wednesday night we had 7 out of the 20 people deciding to play a “1K over,” this is clearly a sick group of individuals!

My bracket shapes up pretty straight forward in the early rounds, with some later upsets. My Final Four being Duke, UCONN, Florida and Gonzaga. Regardless of the outcome the next 4 days of nonstop college basketball should be great.