March Madness betting is growing in popularity by the day. For the casual fan unfamiliar with how to pick your March Madness bet bracket, here is a guide on how to do so.

Firstly, when it comes to picking your March Madness bracket, you will see many sites suggesting you take the best possible teams to win each round.This is misleading, as in theory every team that makes the tournament is the best in their respective conference. The truth is you should work backwards, from the two teams you expect to face off in the final, then to the final four round, the elite eight, sweet 16, round of 32 and ultimately the first round of the tournament.

One suggestion we received from a colleague, was to take teams from the big six conferences. The big six conferences are the Big 12, SEC, Pac 10, Big 10, Big East and the ACC. Since 1997, the two teams playing for the National title, along with the final four have come from the big six conferences an astonishing 97 percent of the time. While there is a three percent chance that a team outside of these six conferences will make it to the finals, don’t hold your breath.

When it comes to taking teams that are middle of the pack, consider picking the upsets in the first and second rounds only. As it stands, these are the two rounds where most upsets happen, the upsets involve teams ranked from number seven to number 12. Ideally, all of the teams in this bracket within your bracket are evenly matched. Meaning to say, there is a 45 percent possibility that a 12^th seed will upset a seven seed. However by the sweet 16 section of the March Madness tournament, you can expect the contenders to outlast the pretenders.