College Football Bowl Pick’Em Pool Strategy: The Secrets Sharp Players Use To Get an Edge
Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images. Pictured: Missouri wide receivers Theo Wease (left) and Luther Burden III (right).
Editor's Note: This is a guest post from PoolGenius, whose picks and tools have helped college bowl pick'em players get an edge for over a decade.
Winning more bowl pick'em pools requires sophisticated strategy, and sharp players employ a proven set of tactics to make crafty picks and rake in top prizes.
Here's a crash course in what it takes to become a perennial championship contender in college bowl pools.
1. Embrace the True Favorites, Not the Hype
Picking winners seems simple, eh? Wrong.
Many bowl pool players fall prey to the siren song of win-loss records and AP rankings, ignoring the true whispers of insider knowledge: the latest betting odds.
Bowl season is a fickle beast, where opt-outs and coaching changes can rewrite narratives faster than a gambler's heartbeat.
Remember Kentucky's Music City Bowl meltdown last year, a 21-0 beatdown at the hands of Iowa? Betting line movement presaged its downfall, as the Cats were without key players like quarterback Will Levis. The market favorite flipped from Kentucky to Iowa by kickoff, the public didn't react quickly enough, and many pool players got caught on the wrong side.
Also, in general, you should favor the favorites. Every upset pick you make is a gamble that decreases your expected final score in the pool in exchange for some extra upside if you get lucky.
Think of upset picks as a tightrope walk over piranhas with a prize at the end. Thrilling, but more often disastrous — and the more upset picks you make, the longer the tightrope gets.
2. Unpopular Picks: Your Secret Gems
Picking winners is crucial, but making unpopular picks that win is often even more important.
Unpopular picks are diamonds in the rough, giving you the chance to leapfrog your competitors in the pool standings when they hit. And sometimes, they don't even require taking on any extra risk.
To unearth these gems, you need to estimate pick popularity for every team.
Public picking trends data from sites like ESPN's Bowl Mania offer a good starting point. But get creative! Think about the demographics of your pool (e.g. is it filled with Michigan fans?) and what picks are likely to be trendy as a result.
Then, armed with win odds and pick popularity estimates, hunt for two types of contrarian gold:
- Under-the-Radar Favorites: Consider Duke in last year's Military Bowl — favored to beat UCF by the sportsbooks but under-picked in pools (only 39% pick popularity). Duke won, 30-13, and gave an extra standings boost to players who trusted the odds.
- Slight Underdogs, Publicly Avoided: Think Tulane in last year's Cotton Bowl — only 1.5-point underdogs, yet picked by a minuscule 20% of pool players. Its 46-45 upset of the Trojans delivered a key differentiating result for only minor added risk.
If you make several unpopular picks and they hit, you're likely to find yourself in the top tier of your pool standings and looking down at the masses.
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3. Tailor Your Picks to Your Pool's Details
Winning pool players are like adaptive predators in the wild; they assess the environment before pouncing. Here's how to adjust your bowl pool pick strategy for the key variables at play.
Pool Size
- Small Pools (under 50 entries): Play it safe with favorites. Upsets are tempting, but tread carefully and almost always resist the temptation.
- Medium-Sized Pools (50-500 entries): Take more calculated risks with value picks, adding more differentiation to your entry. But don't go full-on "Hail Mary."
- Large Pools (500+ entries): Diversify your risk! Play multiple entries, each with unique contrarian bets that could skyrocket you up the standings if most of them hit. Don't be afraid of some long-shot upsets, especially if you fall behind.
Confidence Pools
- High-Confidence Picks: Bias them toward higher-probability value plays with low pick popularity relative to teams with similar point spreads. In larger pools, consider assigning higher confidence to a long-shot pick or two.
- Lower-Confidence Picks: Don't agonize over these! They only make up a tiny percentage of the overall points available to be won.
Point-Spread Pools
- Exploit Stale Lines. Actual point spreads for bowl game teams can shift significantly as kickoff approaches, but your pool's lines will likely be locked in place long before. Identify the biggest discrepancies and take advantage of the free points!
Get Expert Picks For Your 2023 Bowl Pool
Now that you know key strategy principles for winning college bowl pools, the harder part comes next: collecting and analyzing all the relevant data you need to execute these concepts.
At PoolGenius, we have the tools and data you need to get a leg up in college bowl pick'em pools. Since 2014, subscribers to our Bowl Pick'em Picks product have won college bowl pick'em pools nearly twice as often as expected.
The product provides ready-to-play picks for your 2023 bowl pick'em contests (game winner, point spread, and/or confidence point based), all customized for your pool's size, rules and scoring system. And it processes and reacts to new data multiple times per day.
It also includes algorithmic game predictions, recent betting odds for every game, national pick popularity data and a Q&A forum if you have strategy questions.
Winning a bowl pick'em contest will always require luck, but the better your strategy is, the less luck you need to win. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the 2023 college bowl season.
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