Marching Toward Madness

The Change In 2016, College Basketball changed dramatically, and that change impacted significantly the quality of play on the court and the ability for gamblers to predict that activity.   5 Seconds.    The move of the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds is significant.   And gamblers often talk about March Madness trends from earlier this decade without understanding that much of that is invalid data, due to 5 seconds.   The shot clock drives a concept called Average Possession Length.  APL drives number of possessions/game.   One of the best ways to understand and predict future results of points scored by each team is to predict possession counts and then apply possession based stats against those predicted possessions in any given game.    Ken Pom has great data here I'll use to show the impacts of 5 seconds.   If we focus on the Tempo (Possessions/Game Total) you can see it increased.  And although 4 possessions/game seems small, that could be a 12 p

The Seeds There is nothing more exciting than Selection Sunday.   For me that starts the best week of the year.   (And an aside, my second favorite week of the year is the week before when I'm watching the conference tournaments).    Selection Sunday is the result of an important process that is debated but in reality is very regimented and for gamblers important to understand.   This is the NCAA D1 Men's Basketball Tournament Committee Principles and Procedures.   So many times, I hear/read posts from people who don't understand the realities of how it works.   I'm not going to explain it all here; use this reference:    Long Form -- NCAA  There are 3 steps, they are unique and although at times overlapping done mutually exclusive to each other.    What I think most people will find interesting is that although there is much discussion, the process of selecting and seeding teams is done through a bunch of voting mechanisms with many controls on

The Article So the setting, Thursday of 2013;  We are sitting 4th Row Up at Lagasse Stadium watching the mid morning round of games.  I had just recently completed training to do PR for CWT at the time and a reporter is looking for a story.  The GM Jerry got to know our group since we had been there since the first year, so he sends the reporter over to our section, and since I'm trained to do this, it is a great match... and then this happened:  Link to the Article We didn't expect to be above the fold on the Front Page of Friday's edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Also didn't expect to be woken up by Chris' Aunt (maybe this details is wrong?) to tell us first thing on Friday morning.    I have always loved the way he wrote the story -- he told it the way we intended.  Enjoy:  By ALAN SNEL LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL March 22, 2013 - 1:05 am       Tim Husted has spent his entire adult life making a yearly March Mad

Catching Up, The Intro (Updated for 2020) March 2020 will be my 22nd year of a pilgrimage from my home to Las Vegas for March Madness' opening weekend.   Over those 22 years, I've learned a few things along the way and so over the next month, I'll share what I've learned along with a considerable focus on gambling concepts, mostly sharing data and helping to dispel myths and half truths.   But before we get too far into the hard core stuff, let me just walk through the basics.  22 Years.  Here is a run down of the From -- To As best I can remember, I have stayed at the Riviera, Ballys, New York/New York, Caesars Palace, Belagio and now consistently stay at Vdara.    From 5 guys to a room to my own bed/bedroom; this is the area that probably has changed the most.  Well that and the fact that now I actually sleep.   Although most commonly I have gone with Rick Donegan and Chris Iannuzzi with my brother Andrew Husted in many years; it started