Welcome to the Glimm!

We celebrate our silver anniversary with the largest Glimm field ever: 206 entries. And it’s an interesting group: We’ve got Donald Trump and Donald Drumpf and Ben Carson. We’re considering Supreme Court nominees (ConsiderMerrickGarland) and we’ve already given up on them (Ghost of Garland). We’ve got a Leaked Bracket, A Very Good Bracket and Another Very Good Bracket.

Check out a summary of picks to see that the most popular championship pick isn’t even a top seed: No. 2 Michigan State was picked to win the Glimm by 54 people, edging out Kansas (53). You’d can also see the crazy picks: Yale, Stony Brook and Gonzaga each had one championship pick.

Standings will be updated throughout the day and throughout the next three weeks, so check back early and often. And good luck!

Welcome to the 25th Annual Glimm Memorial NCAA Basketball Pool! The brackets are out, which means it’s time to enter the Glimm Memorial, the premiere NCAA Tournament Pool and the only pool named for Alma Glimm. For $5, the Glimm Memorial guarantees three weeks of entertainment. Click here to fill out your bracket.

More details on The Glimm:

WHAT: The 25th Annual Glimm Memorial NCAA Basketball Tournament

HOW: Come back here and fill out a bracket, then either give me $5 cash, or send me the money by your banks online payment system

HOW MUCH: Five bucks per entry. I just said that. Pay attention. 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%.  And if you finish dead last, you get your five bucks back.  Twenty bucks is coming out of the pot to pay for the software that I use (it’s worth it, trust me), 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. 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.

WHY GLIMM? The pool is named for Alma Glimm, my 11th grade math teacher.

AGAIN, WHY GLIMM? Because Mrs. Glimm represents all that is good about an NCAA tournament pool – she proved that anybody can win these office pools. Knowledge of college basketball is irrelevant, and we all have a chance.

When I was in 11th grade, this pool was in its fifth year. In math class one day, I was passing out brackets, getting people to sign up, when Mrs. Glimm swooped in. “Gambling in school?” she said incredulously. “You can’t gamble in school!”  Undeterred, I explained to her that no money was changing hands, and it was just for fun – yes, I lied.  All of the sudden, Mrs.Glimm perked up. “Really?” she said. “Can I try?” So I handed her a bracket.

Mrs. Glimm, who had no knowledge of college basketball and had never participated in a pool before, finished in first place. Of course, because she didn’t think there was money involved, she got a nice pat on the back, and the runner-up took the cash.

WHY MEMORIAL? WHEN DID ALMA DIE? Well, thankfully, Mrs. Glimm is still alive and kicking. But when I decided to name the pool for her, I decided that Glimm Memorial had a good ring to it. So for the sake of marketing, I killed her off. I also changed her name from Marion to Alma, as Greg Wilson exposed in the Wilson Report.

WHAT DOES MRS. GLIMM THINK OF ALL THIS? Mrs. Glimm is a good sport. In fact, 20 years after that 11th grade math class, Mrs. Glimm and other Glimm family members have discovered our pool and now participate with us.

HOW TO PAY: You have 2 options: Give me cash in person, or sen $5 via your bank’s online payment system.