The madness is coming....

Some rambling here about how NCAA tourney pools are scored.

Does anyone understand why scores go 10-20-40-80-160-320 for the final?
Why isn't this just 1-2-4-8-16-32?
Why artificially inflate scores by a factor of 10?

Once at my old job, the owner wanted to run a tourney for the women's pool. She decided to make every game worth 2 points. TWO....not one. WHY?!

Anyways, I usually run a men's pool. And I've got an awesome scoring idea to reward those who pick upsets. (Based on this being me, years ago.....knowing the good teams to pick early, and then getting screwed later.)

I started it as 5-10-15-25-40-65....Not quite the Fibonacci sequence at work, but each round is worth the sum of the previous two. It definitely rewards early rounds versus later rounds.

Then the bonus points for upsets is done as

difference in seeds X round number.

This works well....and you can even get lucky. Like, if you've got a 3 beating a 7 in the sweet sixteen, but they actually beat the 2....then you get extra points for the 3 being there, even though you had them winning an easier game. (Of course, you didn't get the 7 over the 2 in the second round.)

What can suck is if you had a 14 over a 6 in round 2.....that could be 16 bonus points! But if the 11 beat the 6 in round one....then the 14 beating the 11 is only 6 bonus points.

Anyways, there's usually an extra 50 points or so if you're good at calling upsets.

So a few years ago, I scaled back the regular points by 20%.
4-8-12-20-32-52 for the championship.
And sure enough, the first year I did that, I squeaked by with the title.

I've won twice in 11 years of running it. Last year, despite 0 final four teams. Of course, nobody had final four teams last year, so it was actually over before the final weekend. George Mason, though...the bonus points....
11 over a 6 in round 1 = 5
11 over a 3 in round 2 = 16
11 over a 7 in round 3 = 12
11 over a 1 in round 4 = 40

Anyone got any good scoring systems?