It’s estimated that nearly quarter of adults in America will fill out the brackets for 2018 March Madness. This has prompted the Adobe analytics to come up with a #HackTheBracket which is a virtual hand that gives the visitors a chance to dig deeper into each matchup or use artificial intelligence-powered platform to predict the possible winner. Now that printable 2018 March Madness Bracket is available for everyone, Analytics are using this opportunity to assist those who wish to predict the winner to use their predictive models.
Analytics engineers have spent close to six years building these predictive models and testing them internally to see how they do. If players begin by picking their favorite team in each game, they’ll have 75 percent chance of being right.
Through internal competition the San Jose based software company known for creating Adobe Photoshop, has demonstrated that its analytics engine has been consistent with about 80-82 percent correct predictions for the last 5 years, according to Trevor Paulsen who’s a senior product manager for the Adobe Analytics Cloud.
However, Paulsen goes further to say that even the best models in the world will never predict the upsets. This is because there are approximately 9 quadrillion possible brackets. That roughly means a player needs to do one bracket in every second for nearly 300 million years complete all of them. This is the reason why the chance of getting a correct bracket are quite slim. Definitely there is a lot of randomness.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have actually come up the actual figure of potential bracket winners which stands at 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Maybe this is the reason why Warren Buffet took a risk to announce the bracket challenge for his employees at Berkshire Hathaway, where the winner will be taking home a whopping $1 million every year. Recently, the figure went up to $2 million if Nebraska or Creighton emerge the winner.
According to NCAA, there is no evidence of any bracket being perfect to make it to sweet 16. Also, there is no proof of any player who has legitimately picked all the 63 games correctly. Furthermore, one bracket is said to have remained unblemished through the 39 matches on NCAA site and other online sites such ESPN, Yahoo, Bleacher Report, CBS and Fox Sports.
Picking the champion is definitely a tough assignment and that why this tournament is a fun. You can have all the data about possible outcomes but it can also go anyway like 2014 when unlikely contender UConn came from nowhere and won the conference tournament.
Adobe has created its stats from more than 50,000 games between 2017 and 2018 season from SportRadar and preloaded into it #HackTheBracket to allow its visitors to have better comparison using more than 100 metrics. Adobe Analytics is also using this platform to market its analytics business as the latest tool for anyone looking for assistance with their brackets.
Professor Sheldon H. Jacobson from the University of Illinois came up with analytics model that has been available since 2011, but it take a totally different angle. His site “BracketOdds” use a number of tools such as artificial intelligence to come up with possible outcomes.
According to Melliman Group, among the 54 million people, one in four adults did participate in last year March Madness pool. And the news released by American Gaming Association, nearly $10 billion is expected to be wagered on the NCAA pools. Most of the bracket will be filled out electronically apart from copies floating in the offices this week.
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