How It Works

The Game

Everyone starts with $1,000 in play money. You spend it to create NCAA tournament brackets before the games begin. Once the tournament starts, no new brackets can be created — the supply is fixed. As games are played, brackets are eliminated, points are scored, and you can buy and sell brackets on an open marketplace.

Creating Brackets

Brackets can only be created before the tournament starts. There are three ways to create them:

Every bracket must be unique — no two brackets in the entire tournament can have the same set of picks.

Survival

A bracket is alive as long as its picked champion is still in the real tournament. It doesn't matter if your other picks are wrong — as long as your champion hasn't been knocked out, your bracket survives.

When your champion is eliminated, your bracket is dead. But it's not over — a dead bracket keeps earning points for correct picks as long as at least one team it picked anywhere is still playing.

A bracket is fully dead when every team it picked has been eliminated. No more points, no more trades.

Scoring

Points are awarded for each correct pick, doubling every round. The base points are then multiplied by your bracket type:

A perfect hand-picked bracket scores 576 points — 3x more than a perfect random bracket. This rewards the skill and effort of picking every game yourself. Points serve as a bracket's "book value" on the marketplace.

The Marketplace

Once the tournament starts, the marketplace opens. You can buy and sell brackets with other players using your play money balance.

• Set your own asking price (minimum $1)
• Only brackets that are still scoring can be traded
• A bracket can only be listed once at a time
• Every dollar spent on the market is a dollar you can't use to buy other brackets

As brackets die and supply shrinks, surviving brackets become more valuable. A high-scoring alive bracket is premium. A low-scoring survivor is a bargain. A dead bracket with lots of remaining picks still has trade value for the points it'll accumulate.

Top 10 Scoring

Your leaderboard score is based on your best 10 brackets only, ranked by points. You can own thousands of brackets, but only your top 10 performers count toward your ranking.

This is why hand-picked brackets matter: a surviving 3x bracket will almost always land in your top 10 and massively outscore a random 1x bracket. The winning strategy is a mix — hand-pick a few high-conviction brackets for ceiling, and use random packs for coverage.

Winning

When the championship game ends, players are ranked:

1. Survival first — players with at least one alive bracket (they picked the actual champion) rank above everyone else
2. Top 10 points — among survivors, whoever has the most total points across their best 10 brackets wins
3. Net worth — if still tied, highest cash + total bracket point values breaks it

Players with no alive brackets are ranked by net worth below all survivors.

Strategy