Free tools, transparent math

MatchupKing is built and maintained by an independent developer — a one-person project born out of running too many office pools with spreadsheets and group-chat chaos. Every tool here is the one we wanted to exist: fast, printable, no accounts, no dark patterns.

The project is free to use and funded by on-page ads (non-betting categories only) and an optional Plus tier for power features. The core tools stay free forever.

Scores, schedules and standings come from ESPN's public JSON feeds (site.api.espn.com), pulled on a daily schedule with rate limits and a descriptive user agent. If a fetch fails, the previous day's snapshot stays live and the page shows its data timestamp — we never silently show stale numbers as fresh.

The 68-team college bracket field is sourced the same way on Selection Sunday and cross-checked by hand against the official announcement before it goes live (two-person verification — seeds are too important to trust to one fetch).

• Playoff simulator — 100,000 Monte Carlo runs per refresh. Team strength is an Elo rating derived from current record plus a home-field adjustment; each simulated game is a Bernoulli draw from the Elo win probability. The exact formula is shown next to every probability bar on the tool itself.
• Seed baseline (strategy advice) — long-run historical performance of each tournament seed (e.g. a #1 seed wins the title ≈15.5% of the time per region slot). It is a pre-field prior with no current-season team data, and is labeled as such wherever it appears.
• Pool scoring — each pool defines its own points-per-round (default 1-2-4-8-16-32). The leaderboard re-computes on every result; "max possible" only counts games whose picked team hasn't been eliminated.
• Crowd pick rates — an anonymous aggregate of brackets submitted on this site. No personal data, just pick percentages.

No wagers, no entry fees, no prize payouts, no money changing hands in any form — prizes between friends are yours to organize offline. No betting ads, no odds, no point spreads. No newsletter spam: reminder emails are one per event and every email carries a working one-click unsubscribe.

Found a wrong score, a bad seed, or a bug? Email hello@matchupking.com — data corrections get priority and are acknowledged.

Team, league and event names are used for identification only; all trademarks are the property of their respective owners. See the full disclaimer below.