NCAA basketball betting online fans from around the country now have the opportunity to wager on their local team and choose Free Basketball Picks, as long as they are in Division One. Earlier this year at the conclusion of the 2010 NCAA March Madness tournament, the NCAA board of commissioners decided to alter the format of the tournament to allow for a ‘first four’ segment. In essence sports betting fans can now back any Division One school from any conference whether it’s on the AP rankings or in the lowest level of Division One, when it comes to qualifying for the March Madness tournament.

How the ‘First Four’ works, is that two of the games will be played between the lowest seeds of the 68 qualified teams. Conversely, the other two games will be played with teams representing the at large bid qualifiers. The games will be held at the beginning of the opening week of the March Madness tournament, and the winners will advance to the first round games of the actual tournament which will be played on the Thursday and Friday.

In April when the new format was announced, the NCAA decided to add three more teams to the qualifying seeds. Therefore the tournament switched from 65 teams in 2001 to 68 in 2011. Over the last decade, the bottom two teams ranked number 64 and 65 were sent to a qualifying round similar to the new ‘First Four’ setup.

The old setup for the qualifying games, saw teams from some of the weakest conferences in Division One qualify for the tournament. However, this new setup allows for competition in both games to be played across the spectrum of Division One. Ultimately the winner of the seeded teams that face off in the qualifier will make up two of the 16 seeds in tournament brackets. Meanwhile, the at large bid winners will be seeded how they were previously ranked. So if two number 10 seeds face in an at large bid game, the winning 10 seed will play a number seven seed in one of the first round brackets on the Thursday or Friday.