You watched the selection show. You analyzed the bracket. You know which teams you think will live up to their high seeds and which teams will pull off the big upsets. Now, it’s time to fill out your bracket.
WHAT: The 27th Annual Glimm Memorial NCAA Basketball Tournament
HOW: Click here to fill out a bracket, then send me $5 via venmo (username @Josh-Kleinbaum).
HOW MUCH: Five bucks per entry. And yes, you can enter more than once (but no more than five times, thanks to the Nevin Barich rule).
THE PAYOUT: The winner gets 70% of the pot, runner-up 20% and third-place person 10%. To give some context, last year’s winner Kate Lord took home about $680. There are a few other prizes, too: The Orlov (whoever finishes exactly middle of the pack gets their $5 back, in cash, via snail mail), the Glimm Scholarship (the highest-finishing relative of Mrs. Glimm from the previous year gets a free entry), and the Pity Finisher (the last-place finisher gets his/her $5 back). On top of that, thirty bucks is coming out of the pot to pay for Glimm infrastructure, and I give myself 2 free entries.
SCORING: It’s a 1-2-4-8-12-16 scoring system with upset points. So that means that you get one point for picking a game correctly in the first round, two points in the second round, etc. And we use upset points – any time a lower-seeded team beats a higher-seeded team, you get half the difference between the seeds as bonus points (Note: This is a tweak from many previous years, when you got the full difference between seeds, not half). So if a 15 beats a 2, you get 6.5 bonus points. If a 9 beats an 8, you get half a point. The bottom line: It pays to take risks.
HOW TO PAY: Venmo (username @Josh-Kleinbaum). Yes, you’ll see a pic of an older woman at that account. That’s not a mistake. That is Mrs. Glimm.