I stumbled across this plain looking site with a funny name and was amazed at the wealth of advice it had on betting the NCAA tournament. On top of that, the owner of the site is advising anyone who benefits from the strategies posted there make a donation to charity rather than pay it to him! From Poologic.com:

“$250,000. That is my minimum estimate for profits made by the users of this site, assuming they played the recommended multiple-entry strategy. Please donate some of your winnings to the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research”

Poologic Web Page

Updated March 03, 2007 @ 12:22 AM: It turns out that the guy behind this site is a professor at Yale and an expert in probability modeling (Update: the site was actually created by Tom Adams, Kaplan joined him later). You’d think such a smart guy could come up with a better domain name (I kid – I finally figured out that he was going for the pronunciation of “pool-logic” rather than “poo-logic”). More details in this Inc. Magazine article:

Edward Kaplan, a Yale School of Management professor, is an expert in operations systems, probability modeling, and mathematics. As an academic, Kaplan models the spread of AIDS and other diseases for public policy analysis, but in his spare time, set out to find a way to win his NCAA office pool. “We used to enter these things for fun, and always for bragging rights, [but] we would always lose,” he says. “We realized we were going about it randomly and not systematically.”

So Kaplan and a colleague hired a research assistant to pull basketball data from sports gurus’ ratings, regular-season records, and the Rankings Percentage Index (RPI) to create a complex web of relationships between teams, evaluate their strengths, and find a way to optimize points for a tourney bracket. Recently, he’s also been using Las Vegas odds to incorporate late-breaking information.

Kaplan calls his system “fairly complicated,” and says that with the opening-round play-in game, there are an estimated 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 18 billion billion, as mathematicians say) options that his calculations examine.