JUST GIVE ME THE BRACKET! OK, OK, you can enter your bracket here.
It’s been about 340 days since Nina Lin won the first ever NCAA tournament pool she entered. Can she do it again? Or will it be you?
That’s right, kids, it’s that time of year: The Glimm Memorial NCAA Tournament Pool, the only college basketball pool named for Alma Glimm, is upon us. For the low price of $5, you get three week’s worth of entertainment. Just submit your picks, then watch the games, root on your teams and read my cheesy emails.
Full details:
WHAT: The 28th Annual Glimm Memorial NCAA Basketball Tournament
HOW: Fill out a bracket here, 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, Nina took home about $950 last year. 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), the Kids Champion (the top finisher under Bar Mitzvah age; details below) 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.
KIDS CHAMPION: With lots of children of longtime Glimmers now entering the tourney, we’re introducing a new prize: The Glimm Kids Championship. Any kid under Bar Mitzvah age that enters the Glimm (and makes their own picks – this isn’t about mommy or daddy submitting an entry under baby’s name) is also eligible to win the Kids Championship. Like the Glimm Scholarship (awarded to the top finisher related to Mrs. Glimm), the Kids Champion will receive a free entry to the next year’s Glimm. When filling out their bracket, kids should enter YES in the Kids Bracket field.
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.