Musings about March Madness

by Jim Wuelfing, Prevention and Recovery Support Services Consultant, The Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling












As this is being posted, March Madness, the annual right of deciding a national collegiate basketball champion is whittling down the “Sweet Sixteen” to the “Elite Eight.”  Many, if not most, of the people I know are somewhat interested and caught up in the hype and many of them have filled out a bracket and have a few dollars riding on the outcome. Last week’s Council blog (here) talked a lot about the problem gambling aspect of March Madness, the incredible extent of wagering that occurs and how this can be a truly difficult time for many problem gamblers seeking or in recovery. So I decided to try and find a few other interesting tidbits to write about.

In the National Council’s News Roundup, two articles peaked my interest. The first (here) was about the simply incredible odds of picking a perfect bracket. The odds are so small that I don’t even understands the words used.  The perfect bracket odds have been calculated to be between 1 and 128 billion and 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Quintillion?  I don’t even know how to write 9.2 quintillion much less have any understanding of what a number that big even means!

The second article (here) was a study on sports gamblers and the fallacy that sports gamblers are a more savvy lot than the rest of us. The sport studied was soccer and not basketball but it clearly showed that knowing a lot about soccer did not produce better results when gambling than not knowing much about soccer at all. In fact the two subjects that were the best at picking the winners knew very little about the sport at all.

But what I really want to write about, is a lesson I learned about myself. As a consultant to the Massachusetts Council, I have pledged myself not to gamble in a way that brings discredit to the Council and to not gamble illegally. In truth, I rarely gamble at all. But gambling on the bracket is sports betting and sports betting in Massachusetts is illegal, therefore no bracket pools for me.  However, I did fill out a bracket – I just keep it at home and did not use it to make a wager of any kind. 

So what was the lesson? I definitely became more absorbed in the March Madness event. I stayed up too late to catch the end of a game. I checked my IPhone first thing in the morning to see that late night game results. I wondered how I would have fared had I placed my choices against others.  It made me wonder how much that would have changed had I had money riding on the event.  I think I have talked to enough problem gamblers to know that winning and losing are not as important as being “in action”.  Well, I think I got a tiny glimpse of what that means as I felt “in action”, albeit to a very small degree, with my bracket and I didn’t even gamble.

As a preventionist, I do talk about risk management.  So, I would suggest you ask yourself these questions if you have wagered on March Madness?

·         Did you gamble more money than you intended to?

            ·         Did you expect to lose that money or were you motivated to win money?
            ·         Did you jeopardize anything important?
            ·         Did you borrow or use credit?
            ·         Did this become more than a social event?

The title of this blog is Musings about March Madness. I am not suggesting that the answers to these questions are meant to be diagnostic in any way, rather, just something to ponder.