Calcutta/Auction Tool Tutorial

Our Calcutta tool is designed to help you win your March Madness Calcutta auction pool. These are pools where every team is auctioned off, and you earn points from the teams you own when they perform certain tasks, like winning in a given round or pulling off the biggest upset.

The Calcutta tool allows you to enter the customized rules for your specific pool, and get values for each team based on our team ratings and the result of our simulations (as displayed in the Advancement Odds).

It’s designed to let you input some basic scoring options, and a small number of “special” categories, to get an estimate of percentage of the pot each team is worth. You can also enter your estimate of the total pot size, and the actual amounts successfully bid for each team once the auction is underway, in order to get projected dollar values for each team.

It also lets you track which teams you own, and see the projected value of your teams, teams your opponents own, and teams still available to be won at auction.

Let’s go through some of the features.

Entering Your Round-By-Round Payout Rules

Your first step when using the tool should be to enter the amount of the pot you get for each win, in separate boxes, for games ranging from the First Four to the Championship Game.

These amounts represent the value of each win individually in that round. Some pool administrators may express the scoring as a percentage of the total amount of the pot paid for a round. As an example, if an administrator says the Second Round is worth 20% of the pot, you would enter “1.25%” for the Second Round, and not 20%. (That number comes from dividing 20% by the 16 potential winners.)

If your pool doesn’t give any pot share for a win in a particular round (such as the First Four or First Round), just enter “0.”

Entering Any Prop Payout Rules

There are three more boxes that let you enter the percent paid for some common prop events that can also be part of a prize structure in Calcutta. Those are:

• Biggest Upset (by Spread)
• Highest Seed to Reach the Final Four
• Largest Margin of Defeat

No doubt there are innumerable specific props adopted by some pools, some of which can be quite unique. In version 1, we chose to cover a couple of props, but we recognize that these may not cover all options.

So what should you do if your pool has different rules?

• First, you should enter “0” in any prop field that definitely does not apply to your pool.
• Second, try to enter a value in the prop field that most closely resembles one of your scoring rules.
• Third, if you have a specific unique scoring rule, and you are not sure what to do, feel free to ask a strategy question in our Q&A Forum.

Estimating Your Pot Size

When the tool first loads, it will display the estimated value of each team based on a default total pot size.

You can and should change that pot size estimate to something more appropriate for your pool. We have subscribers that play in a wide range of Calcutta pools, from fairly small pots to those with six figures on the line. So it’s unlikely our default pot size estimate will fit your particular pool. You’ll need to use your own knowledge of the pool’s history or participants in order to come up with an initial pot size estimate.

Don’t worry, you can change the pot size estimate at any time. And all team value updates happen immediately, so it’s easy to enter different values and quickly see how the estimated team values change. If you use the tool during a live draft, we also recommend changing this value as the draft progresses.

Entering the Amount Paid for Each Team

Once your Calcutta is underway, you can enter the amount actually paid for a team in the field marked “Actual Purchase Price.” These purchase amounts are used to calculate a projected pot size (discussed in the next section).

Note: these numbers are not saved, so you can change them at any time if you made an error or entered something under the wrong team. If you refresh the page, though, once you are underway, they will go away as well. So you do not need to refresh this page or do anything other than enter each amount.

The calculations will be done automatically once you do that.

Checking The “My Team” Box For Teams You Own

As you purchase teams during the Auction, you should check the corresponding box in the “My Team” column.

The “Auction Results Tracker” section will update on the fly as you check teams and enter purchase prices. It will show you how much you’ve paid so far, what percent of the projected value you own, and what the corresponding dollar amounts are (based on both “Your Projected Pot Size” and the “Pot Projection Based On Purchases”).

It will also show the same values for teams own by your opponents, plus will project the value of the teams still remaining to be auctioned off.

Using the “Value Based on Projected Pot” Field

We display two dollar values on our Calcutta Tool:

“Value Based on Your Pot Size” is the number that results from multiplying our estimate of value as a percentage of the total pot, times the pot size estimate you provide.

“Value Based on Projected Pot” is an automatic number generated once you start entering successful bids for teams.

To create this number we’re simply dividing the total amount paid so far by the total projected percentage value of the teams that have been allocated.

In other words, if ten teams have been purchased for a total of $1000, and those teams are projected to combine to earn 10% of the prize pool on average, then the total projected prize pool is $1,000 / 0.1 = $10,000.

A word of warning with this number: early on, it’s going to be fairly unreliable, because one massive overpay or underpay will have an outsized impact. So you probably should start paying attention to this number more when more than a handful of teams are off the board, and at least some of the top teams have been auctioned. Consider a No. 12 seed that goes for twice the amount you estimated, with the first team off the board. This number would display a “Pot Projection Based on Purchases” twice as large as your initial estimate, since it is based on only one outcome.

It’s still a very valuable tool once the draft gets going, and provides you an estimate number to compare with your total pot size estimate. We would advise using both together, and putting more emphasis on the “Value Based on Projected Pot” as you get deeper into the draft.

How to Handle Pools that Bundle Teams

Some Calcutta pools bundle teams, such as pairing a higher seed with a lower seed, putting all the No. 16 seeds together, or putting lower seeds in each region together.

For this initial version, we display every tournament team, and do not have it set up to customize for bundling of teams. If response to the tool is positive, we may add bundling in future update.

So if you are in a pool where some teams are auctioned together in a bundle, you’ll need to add up the individual values we estimate for each team, and get a combined percentage of value for all teams in the same bundle. Adding up all the teams together should reflect what we think the bundle is worth, using your scoring rules.