March Madness Markets on Polymarket

The tournament streams the venue's standard shapes with basketball flavor: game-winner lines and totals at the 372,000 over/under scale, player props in the 58,000-prop scheme, and advancing-futures that behave like two-leg qualifiers over the course of a weekend.

Advancing rounds are the dataset's signature: a live price per team that settles when the weekend's last buzzer sounds — the tournament-level backtest object.

A Cinderella run is the venue's cadence in miniature: the Cinderella's game-winner reprints within one or two 250ms frames of each run, and the futures ladder rotates with every buzzer beater. The recorded book preserves each reprint at its UTC second.

By contrast the venue's structural texture stays constant: executable prices sit 98.6% of the time on the 0.99/0.995 grid, and one-sided books appear 16.9% of 5-minute snapshots — honest constraints for any bracket study.

The 12 seed leads late; the favorite's game-winner ladder demonstrates an empty ask side while the underdog side rests deep — a one-sided state, second for second in the archive — and the buzzer settles the row to 1. The next-round line opens within minutes with the upset already baked in.

That entire sequence is a spreadsheet of 250ms rows: depth swings, price steps, and the outcome column — a complete case study of re-ranking in one query.

Early-round games book thinner than Saturday night favorites, and 16.9% one-sided snapshots are the venue's normal rather than an anomaly. The honest edge on the tournament is the same as everywhere: read the recorded ladder for what a game actually rested, at the second the upset happened.

• NBA data
• Sports catalog
• Live odds