March Madness: 5 bracket alternatives you need to try, from Calcuttas to confidence pools

NOTE: We published this back in 2019!

Filling out a bracket for typical March Madness pools is an all-time classic activity and makes the NCAA men’s tournament infinitely more fun and interesting.

But it’s not the only game you can play involving the tournament.

As you’ll see from this list compiled below, there are a whole bunch of other ways to make your tourney experience more fun (and, if you play for money, potentially more lucrative) that involve picking games or the players involved in it. Some of them are bracket-based, but these will get you to think differently about how to strategize.

Here are a few I highly recommend:

1. Calcutta

This one isn’t for the faint of heart: You and a group of friends get together and bid on the teams involved in the tournament in an auction with real dollars. Every time one of your teams win, you get back a percentage of the pot that increases in each round. The hope is you make back more than you invested.

Let’s say you won the bid on an underdog who becomes a Cinderella year for only $50. You would have made some serious return on investment with that pick because they made it to the Final Four. On the flip side, if you bid a lot more to, say, get a No. 1 seed like Virginia and watch them lose to 16 seed UMBC, you lose a lot.

2. A 1 to 64 confidence pool

This was run by a friend of mine for years and it was mind-bending: Instead of picking the winners, you rank the teams involved 1 to 64. Every time a team wins, you get the amount of points in the ranking added to your total. So if Duke is your no. 10 ranked squad, you get 10 points every time they win. The wrinkle? You want the LOWEST score possible. So if there’s a sleeper 12 seed you think can win a couple of times, you’ll want to rank them in the middle of the pack. Think there’s a vulnerable No. 1? Send them down.

3. Survivor pool

Similar to its NFL equivalent, you pick on team to win per day of the tournament, but you can’t use them again once you’ve picked a winning team. Win, and you move on, which can get tricky as the tourney gets tighter.

4. Fantasy leagues

You draft a team based on the players involved, which obviously can be tricky: Do you take a player who is talented but who might lose early?

5. Squares or Box pool

Just like the Super Bowl, you set up a 10 x 10 grid and numbers are randomly assigned to each column. You win money based on the final score of each game in the tournament if your box matches the final digits in each of the scores of a game. That means you could win multiple times throughout the entire tourney and payments can increase with each round.