NCAA Tournament Gambling Cheatsheets

I'm off to Vegas this afternoon to soak in the awesomeness that is the opening weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament - make sure to check in tomorrow on the Fanhouse for a live blog of the festivities. As part of my now yearly pilgrimage to Vegas for this weekend, I started preparing simple cheat sheets with the pertinent information for each game of the first two days. I've found that making them too complex just leads to confusion, so there's only a few key highlights included. All the games are listed in sequential order - trying to read a normal bracket sheet and divine the next game that will pop up can be difficult. For each game there is the Ken Pomery rating for each team as well as the log5 predicted winner based on his pythagorean ratings. A quick glance at these ratings will show that games such as the #6 USC v. #11 Kansas State matchup are likely upsets. The other key piece of information is each teams performance against the spread during the season from VegasInsider.com - an easy to way to see if that #1 seed is likely to cover that enormous line (in UNC's case, yes ... for Memphis, probably not).

Download the cheatsheets for Thursday and Friday and then follow along the next couple of days from your cubicle if you can't make it to Vegas - Fanhouse will try to bring some of the buzz and excitement from the sports books to your desk.