[bogey]

This just kind of occured to me and I was wondering everyone's thoughts.

It seems that generally (there a few exceptions) the higher ranked team in a tournament matchup is a favorite to beat the lower ranked team. So the max EV play on any given game is just to take the higher ranked team (no points given assumed).

So it would seem when filling out an NCAA bracket the most EV thing you can do is just to pick the higher ranked team to always beat the lower ranked, thus ending up with 4 #1 seeds in your Final Four.

However, anyone who does this is probably very unlikely to win their pool. (But maybe they are still the most likely overall? intuitively if you saw a bracket like this you would think no way they can win, but maybe that is wrong) It seems you may have to mix in -EV on singular games to come up with a greater EV for your overall bracket. This seems like a stange paradox which I can't quite understand.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Or did I make some invalid assumptions?