How Many Bracket Upsets Should You Pick in March Madness?

Be careful with bracket upsets, picking too many can quietly ruin your chances.

by Jason Lisk - Feb 27, 2026

Picking too many bracket upsets can be the silent killer of many brackets, at least in standard scoring formats. But how many bracket upsets should you pick in March Madness? How many upsets in the first round?

There’s no hard and fast rule for answering those questions; however, we have noticed that the general public usually takes too many upsets on average. Below, we’ll explain why that’s a common mistake and provide the math (plus some prime examples) of what works.

Find the Optimal Number of March Madness Upset Picks

Don’t guess how many upsets to pick, use math instead.

Our NCAA Bracket Picks product runs simulations based on your pool’s size and scoring system to show exactly how aggressive you should be.

In most standard pools, that often means fewer upset picks than the public while still finding the “right ones” to click.

How Many Upsets Should You Pick?

There’s no set rule for how many bracket upsets to pick—every NCAA Tournament is different. However, most people choose too many, especially in smaller pools (50 or fewer entries) with standard scoring.

The psychology behind this is understandable. It’s called March Madness because sometimes the improbable and seemingly impossible happens. The public lives for the underdog in March. It’s not as fun to brag about how you correctly predicted the No. 4 seed to handle the No. 13 seed. Everyone wants to pick the next Loyola-Chicago, who made an improbable run to the Final Four as a No. 11 seed in 2018 and captured the nation.

Another part of the issue here is that the mainstream sports media has trained people to think that the way to win a bracket pool is to guess most of the first-round upsets and every dark horse team that will make a deep run.

Generally, that’s not the way it works.

Picking Fewer Upsets Is Often a Better Strategy

One of us has been in a yearly pool with 100-200 entries for over twenty years. Only about once per decade has even a single person in the pool picked all four Final Four teams correctly. Yet every year, somebody still walks away with a nice chunk of change for winning.

Most years, the winner is usually somebody who makes solid picks through the first few rounds, gets two or three Final Four teams correct, and/or nails the tournament winner. But in years when a very unpopular pick wins it all, the winner of the pool may not even have picked the champion right. And 100-200 people is not a small pool.

Given that context, it often makes sense to pick conservatively across most of the bracket and concentrate your risk on one or two educated bets on high-leverage picks.

The smaller your pool, the more that becomes true. If you are in a small pool of less than 10 people, simply going with chalk picks and letting your opponent shoot themselves in the foot with risky bracket upset picks is a sound strategy.

Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

We’ll get to our results soon, but first, we want to highlight a research article published in 2009 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology about NCAA Tournament predictions. The professors who studied picks from the public came to a similar conclusion:

“Furthermore, it appears that individuals would have been better served, on average, by using a more conservative strategy. The average performance of participants in the Tournament Challenge in 2004 was 75.2% correct (72.9% in 2005). A strategy of always picking the lower seed would have resulted in 87.5% correct in 2004 (75.0% in 2005). Thus, on average, individuals predicted too many upsets and would have done better by always picking the lower seeds.”

Now, we will discuss why you should diversify with some risk on upsets in a bit, but our findings based on doing this year after year match what this study found. People should generally be more selective in picking upsets than they are.

Thought Exercise: 12-5 Upset Example

Over the last six tournaments, eight No. 12 seeds won in the first round against the No. 5 seeds in 24 tries (33%).

How many No. 12 seeds should you pick in your bracket in that hypothetical, knowing that just over one per year has won in recent years?

Many would respond by picking one No. 12 seed to win and staying with the favorite in three games. That’s essentially what our data shows. Over the last decade, the average No. 12 seed has been picked to win 24.3% of the time in the first round by the public.

Here’s a quick probability study. Let’s assume that, in the following NCAA tournament, exactly one No. 12 seed will win. Based on that assumption, what is the expected outcome if you blindly pick one No. 12 seed to beat a No. 5 this year?

• There’s a 25% chance that you choose the right 12 seed to win, and you get all four of the 5 vs. 12 seed games right. As a result, you would earn 4 points in most scoring systems.
• There’s a 75% chance you pick the wrong 12 seed, meaning you only get two of the four 5 vs. 12 games correct. As a result, you would earn 2 points in most scoring systems.

Therefore, you would expect to score 2.5 points on average by randomly guessing one 12-seed to beat a 5-seed.

Compare that to a strategy that picks all 5 seeds to win. If you do that, your expected points scored are 3.0, or 20% higher.

When The 12-5 Upset Makes Sense

Of course, we’re not saying you should never pick a 12-over-5 upset. Our point is that you should only pick bracket upsets when they are justified by the strength and popularity of the teams and not blindly follow “experts” who say you must choose one upset by a No. 12 seed.

In 2019, Oregon, a No. 12 seed, was our recommended pick to the Sweet 16 because we had them power-rated that highly compared to the matchups they would face to get there. But we didn’t make that pick based on filling a quota of needing to pick “upsets.”

Occasionally, there’s an Oregon in your bracket, and a 12-over-5 makes sense. That happened again in 2025, as we had No. 12 seed Colorado State power rated higher than No. 5 seed Memphis.

But that’s not the case for most years, and you’re better off picking all the No. 5 seeds to advance rather than forcing an upset into your bracket.

Related: For full history, check out our article: How Often Does a 12 Seed Beat a 5 Seed?

What About Years With Wild Upsets?

One of the reasons people pick a lot of upsets is because, in real life, there are upsets. You will not go 63-0 if you select every favorite. But here’s a newsflash: you aren’t going 63-0 by mixing it up and picking a lot of upsets, either. Check out our Myths article on matching historical results for more details.

In large pools, you want to take on some extra risk (see our section on Balancing Risk and Value), but even then, you are usually better off picking and choosing where to allocate and concentrate your risk-taking.

But what about a year like 2018, when there were a ton of upsets? That year, Loyola-Chicago reached the Final Four as a No. 11 seed. By the end of the first weekend of games, one-half of the bracket consisted of teams seeded No. 3 or worse, including two 7’s, two 9’s, and an 11 advancing.

Even in Upset-Heavy Years, Conservative Brackets Can Win

Even though everyone loves picking underdogs, the public isn’t particularly good at identifying the right upsets. We highlighted Loyola-Chicago as a first-round “value gamble” pick in our 2018 Early Brackets Writeup because the public liked them far lower than their true odds of winning one game that year. Less than 0.5% of the public had them in the Final Four.

Our “Best Brackets” across All Scoring Systems averaged 23.9 wins in the first round and 8.7 wins in the second round of the 2018 NCAA Tournament. In a vacuum, those are lower numbers than usual. But remember, you aren’t trying to post a specific score to win a bracket. You are trying to be better than your opponents.

In 2018, the public averaged 21.6 wins in the first round and 7.0 wins in the second round.

Furthermore, our strategy was also better positioned moving forward, with an average of 5.0 Elite Eight teams and 2.4 Final Four teams alive (Compared to 3.8 and 2.0, respectively, for the public). Our overall performance in the wild and wacky 2018 was that users won a prize 3.1 times more often than expected. That was in line with our five-year performance.

So, in a year where chaos reigned, picking fewer bracket upsets than the public still led to excellent results.

What About Bracket Pools That Reward Upsets? 

The advice to avoid picking too many upsets is context-dependent but generally suitable for standard-scoring pools and those with a relatively small size (less than 50).

But obviously, that advice could change with different rules. Let’s run through those situations:

• While people are generally too risky with upset picks in most pools, they aren’t risky enough in pools that provide upset or seed-based bonuses in early rounds.
• If you get “extra credit” for picking upsets, the calculation changes when upsets become profitable.

For example, let’s return to our hypothetical scenario where exactly one No. 12 seed wins in the first round. If your pool has a “seed difference” upset bonus in addition to the standard 1 point for a first-round win, then a correct No. 12 seed pick is worth 8 points, while a correct No. 5 seed pick is only worth 1 point.

With this scoring, you’d maximize your first-round score by picking all four No. 12 seeds to win (earning you 8 points for the single correct upset) rather than all four No. 5 seeds (earning you only 3 points for three correct picks). However, many of your opponents will likely still only pick one or two No. 12 seeds to win.

If you are in larger pools, the risk profile needed to post a likely prize-winning score also changes. In those cases, we may recommend a few more reasonable bracket upset picks.

That’s why we customize our advice to each subscriber and pool. While most people pick too many upsets, which are the silent killers of their pool chances, be aware that there are some cases where people are not risky enough. See our Bracket Picks Product for customized advice based on pool size and scoring. 

Find the Winning Strategy for Your Bracket Pool

In several years, our simulations have shown that in small pools, our subscribers can often have an optimal bracket by picking the tournament favorite to win the title because of their popularity and being fairly conservative early.

That’s because the early-round picks are often expected to provide enough value to win the pool. The strategy here is that many other pool members will also take the most popular champion choice but make too many upset picks early, so they’ll fall behind and cannot then catch up.

Like clockwork, we get complaints that those small pool brackets are too chalky every year. People subscribe and then want to be amazed by their early upset picks.

Every year, we also survey our customers after the tournament. On average, since 2015, in pools of 10 or fewer, our brackets have won a prize 52% of the time (compared to an expected prize rate of 21% based on pool sizes and the number of brackets our customers enter).

Our brackets have won a prize 48% of the time in pools of 11 to 30 entries (compared to an expected prize rate of 14%).

The evidence speaks for itself.