Gearing up for the largest college basketball tournament of the year? Trying to decide between going chalk or mixing it up and picking underdogs all the way? If you’re going to put that cold hard cash collected for the office pool into your pocket, you’re going to need more than superstition and lucky guesses if you are going to make it past that Sweet Sixteen round.

While the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 147.57 quintillion to 1, you can improve your  chances by using data analytics to select your teams. Choosing the league favorites can usually get you halfway through the tournament with at least a few teams still standing, but nobody can predict the occasional upset from that number 12 seed. Or can they? Last year, TIBCO Spotfire software helped customers fill out their brackets with a 95% accuracy rate.

Let Spotfire make those same data-driven predictions for you. There are 68 teams starting in the tournament, and maybe you want to account for factors aside from seed placement. Location, for example. Everyone is familiar with home-court advantage, why not analyze whether distance away from the hometown affects the odds of winning? Use Spotfire Map Charts to give compelling visual insights into game locations versus the home court location.

You don’t have to be an analytics wiz to get started—all you need is analytics software, a data set, and the drive to win. Download a free trial of TIBCO Spotfire, sign up for our free Webinar, and find a few public datasets to get started. Who knows–the Cinderella of this year’s tournament could just be you!