BMM10 Selection Show! Will your selections make the big dance?

48 of the 65 berths for Basenotes March Madness 2010 have been locked in, and 17 remain!

What's Basenotes March Madness?

Basenotes March Madness, or BMM, is a perfume lover's take on the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, a 65-team, single elimination tournament where only one team is left standing. Instead of basketballs we have bottles, and instead of two-pointers and free throws we've got your votes to decide who advances and who goes home.

How does it work?

Starting March 1st with the Play-In Game, there will be a new BMM10 thread every day with the day's games, in poll form. You choose who you'd like to see move to the next round. Your only criteria for voting is "Which of these 2 fragrances would you most like to see advance?" It could be that you love the fragrance, the sillage, the bottle, or just hate the competition. Usually there will be multiple games to one poll, up to 4 at a time in the early rounds.

What's the Selection Show?

I'm doing it a bit differently this year, I learned a lot from last year's event and this one will be even better. We're revealing the first 48 entries tonight, and giving you, the user, the chance to decide not one, not two but eight fragrances to make it into the tournament. You'll do that by suggesting, in this thread, who you'd like to see in the tournament. I'll take eight suggestions at random, along with eight veteran members who I'm asking via Private Message, and I'll make the last pick to round out the field. These seventeen picks will be randomized and fill out the last of the field.

EDIT: Sorry, may not have been clear, I do need to limit suggestions to one per post, one suggestion per user. Multiple people can suggest the same frag. If there are multiple suggestions in one post only the first one will be considered. You can, however, edit your one suggestion up to the last day, the 14th.

So who's in?

I thought you'd never ask. Here's the 2010 brackets so far, click for full size!


There are already some good matchups set for round one, and a lot of blank spaces that your suggestions can help fill. Suggestions will be taken until February 14th, which will mark the full reveal and the start of the Prediction Contest.

Prediction Contest? Like we pick the winner?

Yup, and you fill out the whole bracket before the first game is played. Surreality won the Prediction Contest last year and an_oud_girl took runner up. Once I reveal the full brackets, you'll have until February 28th to send me, by any means necessary, your completed bracket. You can use the image I provide and copy and paste with the image editor of your choice, you can print it and scan in your results, take a picture of your completed form and email it, mail a printed form to me, or send me an easy-to-follow text list. First round games are worth 1 point, second round is worth 2, 3rd round is worth 4, and so on, up to 32 points for correctly predicting the winner. The high score is 121 out of a possible 192 points. I will not be accepting late entries this year! Sorry, but you'll have quite a bit of time to fill out a bracket!

So what's new this year?

The methodology for choosing the fragrances has changed for half the field, and it shows, there are a lot of newcomers and I'm sure there will be some "Why isn't X in the tournament?" I say suggest it in this thread. Notably, I'm using Somerville Metro Man's SotY data from last year to determine 16 of the spots, and Grant has provided me with the 16 Most Owned fragrances, along with the final 16 Most Reviewed fragrances. So Most Worn, Most Owned, and Most Reviewed, in that order for priority purposes (to resolve duplicate entries, unless a frag would rank higher in another set of 16). The actual process of what frag goes in what spot on the board is a bit dense but if you're curious I can answer those questions via PM. We're also taking more forum suggestions, 3 more than last year. Last year 5 veteran users each got to make 2 additions to the field, this year it's 9 veteran users each making 1 selection, and the play-in will be fan-selected instead of the borefest it was last year (sorry to those that enjoyed the Light Blue PH versus Secretion Magnifiques matchup).

Also, all games will be 24 hours this year, instead of the 48 hour games towards the end, I feel like it dragged down the tempo of the thing. 24 hours to decide everything, including the champion!

Did you forget anything?

Probably. If I left something out post a message, if not go ahead and enter your suggestion for the 8 forum entries.

Sorry, may not have been clear, I do need to limit suggestions to one per post, one suggestion per user. Multiple people can suggest the same frag. If there are multiple suggestions in one post only the first one will be considered. You can, however, edit your one suggestion up to the last day, the 14th.

I debated with exactly that quite a bit, and came down on the reasoning that this is going on in men's discussion, and while I've got no problem in assisting the running of a women's tournament, my belief is that there are enough good competitive men's frags to run the field solely with them. I just don't think I have the time involved to run two separate tournaments, mens and womens.

I've got seven of the eight user selections PMs received, not counting my selection.

In no particular order, count on these seven also being in the brackets:

CdG Avignon
Old Spice
Dior Eau Noire
Chanel Coromandel
Knize Ten
Diptyque Eau Lente
SL Ambre Sultan

...along with the 8 frags to be determined via this thread.

Keep going! Plenty of time to make suggestions still.

Up with ye!

Interesting premise, SoS. My biggest issue with that is the additional time required for me to tally up the votes. Round 1 is 32 matchups, and an average matchup will be about 100 votes per match. That's around 3200 entries to go through, and last year I was doing about all I could getting here at the same time midnight every day to post the new poll for the day and record the previous day's scores. It's a cool idea but quite labor intensive, especially with the amount of games to be played.

EDIT: There is a vBulletin addon called vBookie that would make this easier but Grant doesn't have it on here, I can't really ask him to modify the forum for a one month ordeal, and I'm not sure if it supports VB4.

Well, part of the reason Grant puts up with the mass of BMM threads in March is that is all does stay on Basenotes, meaning advertisers get seen throughout the tournament. I wouldn't dream of having this extent past Basenotes and diverting traffic away from the advertisements that help this place stay alive. I'm not saying abandon the idea, but it either needs to be used on a smaller scale (perhaps a smaller tournament to decide which fragrances 'on the bubble' advance to BMM) or with the help of a plugin like vBookie, or totally standardized (ie, a copy-and-paste template that I can drop straight from the forum into Excel).

I may toy with it for next year's event, which I'm already working on.

A lot of good suggestions so far, keep them coming! Eight more days and the field will be locked in, don't miss your chance.

Thanks for bringing this back to the top, I let it slide for a few days while I worked on getting the SoTY stuff dialed in.

I think I'll make a suggestion myself! If the randomness gods don't see to it that this one gets in, I may have to make it my personal selection despite not knowing a ton about it, and that would be L'Instant de Guerlain Pour Homme, the most-worn fragrance last week.

Only a few more days to get your picks in, don't be left out!

I'm gonna be moving the deadline forward for this by one day, so you officially have until Saturday night to get your picks safely in, I'll be doing the drawing on Sunday and revealing the brackets then.

Okay, here are our lucky winners!

Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille
Czech & Speake No. 88
Creed Windsor
Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet
Aramis Havana
Giorgio Beverly Hills For Men
Le Labo Rose 31
Ralph Lauren Polo (Green)

And the finalized brackets look like...this!


The brackets are done and this selection show is over, the prediction contest and schedule of games will be up soon!

I hear you, there's always gonna be something worthy that doesn't make it in. Heck, I had about 5 I wanted to use my 1 pick on, and then when I saw what my matchup ended up being I regretted choosing Wall Street but fair is fair. This year I really wanted to try a totally random selection rather than hand-picking it, so you end up with a considerable underdog like Windsor in the mix. I'm constantly tweaking, modifying and hopefully improving the process so there's the most fun throughout the whole show, from Selection Sunday to The Final Spritz and beyond (hint, hint).

Well, there are three different ways to be a 1 seed, either you're the Most Worn, Most Owned, or Most Reviewed, and A*Men was the most owned that wasn't a duplicate (#4 overall). There actually was a bit of confusion over the seeding process this year but it was too late by the time I caught it, the idea was that wherever a frag was ranked highest would determine it's seed, and duplicates in the other datasets were eliminated. In practice this got confusing quick, I chose instead to prioritize them by what I felt was order of importance, so Most Worn, Most Owned, and Most Reviewed in that order. I didn't want the 16th most worn fragrance (Black Orchid) to not make it in because I had to make room for the 16th Most Reviewed, because I felt that what people are wearing now is more important than what's been reviewed over the last ten years. I apologize but I decided to go ahead and roll with what I had and try doing it right next year, with highest overall seeding determining the spot. There are some aspects of BMM that are pretty tightly modeled after the NCAA tournament and some that really aren't, the seeding is closer to the tightly modeled side, using data instead of personal preference.

I think using 3 different sets of data helps get a wider range of fragrances into the mix, this year we've got a better estimation of what people are really wearing.

Using data to determine seeding isn't going anywhere, but the plan is to use a different set of data every year, so we have some new entries every year.

No, no offense taken on either count, I know better than that. I like getting critiqued on this stuff, and suggestions and commentary are great; I make no suggestion that this is an exact science, there's a lot of spontaneity to offset the methodical stuff. Next time around I'm definitely going to be trying the "highest overall seed" method and see how that affects the brackets, as it stands every fragrance is seeded where it is because it was statistically ranked there in at least one category. I live and learn with this stuff.