Not Just Another NCAA Bracket Game

March 17th, 2008

If you haven’t filled out an NCAA bracket yet (or even if you have), head on over to the Newsvine Cinderella Bracket Challenge and pick your teams before Thursday’s tournament tipoff.

The grand prize this year is an XBOX 360, and once again, we’re proud to present you with what we believe to be the best NCAA Tournament game in the business. Instead of taking an hour to pick an entire bracket full of teams only to see the people who pick the top seeds score the most points, the Cinderella Bracket Challenge gives you a limited budget of 300 credits to pick as few or as many teams as you want. Top seeds cost the most and weaker seeds (“Cinderellas”) are cheap.

Your goal is to pick the basket of teams you can afford, given a fixed budget, that will net the most total victories in the tournament.

So if you’re interested in the NCAA Tournament, head on over to the Cinderella Bracket Challenge and you can fill out up to three separate entries. Make sure to either join an existing group or create a group of your own and invite your friends in. We don’t encourage gambling at Newsvine, but what you do behind closed doors is your business. :)

Like this entry? You can follow me on Twitter here, subscribe via email here, or get the RSS feed if that's how you roll.

7 Responses:

Devon Shaw says:
Effin sweet. I’m in.
*addict*
#1 - March 17th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Devon Shaw says:
Interesting.
Not to spoil any strategy here, but this is actually a lot more strategic than simply picking brackets. The idea of course, is that you have to not only fill out the most likely bracket outcome, but you have to calculate the average cost of points per win, then select the most efficient combination of teams based on projected victories while also factoring upset potential. Even if a #1 seed won the championship game, six victories at the cost of 130 points is only a marginal success with high risk. You’d have better odds assembling those six victories through another combination of teams.
And that’s all I have to contribute publicly. :) This is fun.
#2 - March 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Rob Goodlatte says:
Excellent job as usual. Look forward to kicking everyone’s ass. Duke Duke mothafuckas!
#3 - March 18th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Phil Scott says:
Hey Mike, just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that this morning when I went to go create my entry it looks like the ability to create new ones is already turned off. Damn my procrastination!
#4 - March 20th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Mike B says:
Sounds pretty good. I’m hoping for a Football (Soccer) tournament sometime soon though!
#5 - March 20th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Mike D. says:
Phil: Sorry about that. I think we locked it a few hours earlier by accident. :(
#6 - March 24th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
r says:
it wont let me creat a entrey how do i do it
#7 - March 15th, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Leave a Reply:

Shared

Solitude and Leadership:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information…

Takes a little while to get going, but overall a great article about the virtues of seeking solitude from distractions in order to develop your own original thoughts.

“I think you’ve got a pretty good imagination, despicability-wise!”

“Look Around You - Computer Games”

Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this BBC series before. Brilliant. Make sure to watch them all. (via daringfireball)

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers:

Do you think Chelsea Clinton asks herself if her mom would understand something complex? No. Because her mom is a badass.

How Doctors Die:

If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity.

This is the most concise, easily understood article on the perils of end-of-like care in the United States I’ve ever read. It is a must-read, and frankly, a must-heed, in my opinion. (via kottke)

Lost Type Co-op | Browse Fonts:

A nice collection of pay-what-you-will typefaces from Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran.

How to interview a designer with the perfect design exercise:

These sorts of tests are common for engineering hires, but it’s nice to see an example of a good design-oriented one.

Jessica Hische's Lovely Blog:

Embarrassed I had never seen this until today. Lovely work all around. (via drawar)

This recently unearthed video of Steve Jobs at work during the early days of NeXT is a remarkable look inside how he ran meetings, how he created culture at his startups, and how others — like Joanna Hoffman around the 11 minute mark — called B.S. on his reality distortion field. It’s also remarkable in that it reveals Jobs to be a man who picks carrots in pressed work shirts.

Paper Birds by Diana Beltran Herrera

View.js — A simple, lightweight, jQuery photo viewer for the web

The Republican Clown College by WMxdesign. These are so great. Make sure to check out the whole set.

BuiltWith: Web Technology Usage Statistics:

Sometimes when you are deciding on technologies to use on a new site (e.g. jQuery vs. YUI or MS SQL vs. MySQL) it’s instructive to examine what everyone else is doing. BuiltWith has an incredible amount of trending data to help you out in that regard. Very, very cool.

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design:

Lots of good thinking here. No solutions, but a nice reminder that two-dimensional touch interfaces are transitional, not permanent.