Shallow End of the Pool

This is the time of year is the only time I do any betting. I usually get involved in both an NCAA Basketball pool and an Oscar pool. And what I find odd is that I'm much better at the basketball predictions even though I know virtually nothing about college basketball. I watch maybe one or two games over the season, and then my picks end up surprisingly good. Meanwhile, even though I know a lot about movies and that whole Entertainment Weekly sort of thing, I rarely do well in predicting the Academy Awards.

My theory is that when you know too much about these things, you don't pick enough upsets. When I fill out my bracket (that's not code for something dirty; it's something you do in NCAA pools), I put in lots of upsets. My general strategy is to always pick the 9 seeds to beat the 8 seeds, occasionally pick 13 seeds to beat 4 seeds, and so on like that. I usually arrange it so that even if the upset doesn't work out, the winner of the round-one game in question would lose in the next game anyway. But I don't follow that always. This year, for example, I relied heavily on Gonzaga. If they had actually beaten Arizona (and not, say, lost in double overtime) I'd be golden.

As it is, though, I'm still doing well. Because I'm not blinded by things like "which team is better." Guys who know what they're doing spend a lot of time comparing the skill levels of the various teams and talking about half-court defense and three-point shooting and so on, and end up filling out their brackets according to who ought to win. But if every team that should win did, we'd never have any upsets. And as a result, people like me (who keep putting Duke in every Final Four, because we vaguely remember when that happened every year) do surprisingly well.

This causes tensions sometimes. Like, I tuned in to the Gonzaga-Arizona game with one minute left to go in regulation. And my reaction was a pleasantly surprised "Hey! I might have been right!" And then I watched the rest of the game, obviously rooting for Gonzaga, but I wasn't devastated when they lost. This might have been because I don't have money on the pool I'm in. But meanwhile, other people take it more seriously. In this case, I wasn't right; but sometimes, the crazy unbelievable upset happens, and it favors the random picker like me. That drives serious players crazy.

I know that because in the Oscar pool, my position is reversed. I watch most of the movies, I read the picks of the cognoscenti, and I pay attention to which studios seem to do well at these things. Then I go ahead and carefully make my picks. And I get a pretty consistent 60-70% accuracy rate on the big categories. But that's never good enough to win, because people who know what they're talking about never guess things like Mira Sorvino or Roman Polanski. The people who win are the people who take risks. Some years they'll get 90% right; some years they'll get 30%. In the years where they win, they look like geniuses; and in the years they lose, they look like crazy people.

Anyway, remember when I posted my predictions for the Unpopular Oscars? I made seventeen predictions. Four of them were correct. Next time, I'm just going to make stuff up. You won't be able to tell the difference.