The ESPN Tournament Challenge (ESPN TC) App allows friends and family to easily “bet” on the annual March Madness tournament. March Madness is the official unofficial name of the annual NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball championship tournaments. Users (or competitors) predict the winners of every single game in this single-elimination tournament, including the champion of the tournament and the score for the final championship game, in what is called their “bracket.” Users can create up to 25 brackets and enter into different groups where their brackets compete. As the games are played throughout March, participants win points when their predicted team advances, and a leaderboard is updated in real-time until the final basketball game is played and a winner of the “pool” of “brackets” is declared. Unofficially, groups can decide on having an entry fee and creating a contest that awards prize money based on rules created by the group beforehand.
“My bracket is bad,” Nate Peterson said. Nate is a Hackley sophomore, who is involved in a bracket in which each member pays $30 to enter. “But participating is worth it because the games are fun to watch even if things don’t go my way.”
Other resources are available to people to create brackets for the tournament, but what sets ESPN TC apart is that it provides detailed information on team stats and news updates. On the app, ‘BracketCast’ allows users to watch what is happening in a game live if they cannot watch it on a TV. The premium version, ESPN +, which requires a paid subscription, has Bracket Tools, Bracket Predictor, and Bracket Analyzer, which assist you in making your predictions and have recently been made available for the Women’s Tournament Challenge as well as the men’s.