Friday, March 16, 2012

Pain Machine Tournament Picks

You should be able to see (I believe) the Pain Machine's tournament picks here

For the tournament, I don't like to make all "chalk" picks so I am set up to force a certain number of upset picks.  (This is complicated somewhat by the play-in games.)  If the PM predicts an outcome where a lower seed beats a higher seed, that counts as one of the upset picks.  Otherwise the PM converts the weakest wins to losses until it has the requisite number of upsets.  This year, the PM's predicted first-round upsets (in order of likelihood) were:

Texas (11) over Cincy (6)                   
Cal (12) over Temple (5)                      
NC State (11) over San Diego St. (6)  
Purdue (10) over Saint Mary's (7)        
WVU (10) over Gonzaga (7)                 

There are a couple of upsets in the later rounds, notably Kansas over UK (although that game is a near coin-flip according to the PM -- UK by 0.6 points).

Texas came very close to beating Cincy.  The PM actually also had Texas upsetting FSU, so that loss hurts.

Cal didn't even make it to the Temple game, having one of the worst tournament performances ever losing to USF.  Nonetheless I kept this prediction, now USF over Temple.  NC State beat SDSU.  The Purdue / St. Mary game is tonight.  I was at the WVU / Gonzaga game -- Gonzaga simply outplayed WVU and shot very, very well.

The PM is once again competing in the Machine Madness contest, which you can follow here.  As with the past few years the "chalk" picks are leading the contest, but that will change if any of the competitors get a few upset picks right.   A quick look suggest that so far only a few entries have gotten an upset pick correct -- the PM has the NC State result and AJ's Madness got the VCU pick correct.  (The bottom couple of entries seem fairly random.)  The overall winner will probably be determined by who wins the tournament.  If Kentucky wins it will be Danny or the Matrix Factorizer (depending upon the outcome of Duke/Baylor).  Otherwise it will go to the predictor who got the winner correct.

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