Here is a pattern from the Brckt database that should change how you fill out your US Open bracket.

In round one of a tournament, the Brckt crowd’s majority pick wins roughly 60 to 65 percent of the time. By the round of 16 that number drops to around 25 to 40 percent. And in the quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals of this summer’s hard-court and grass events, the majority pick lost far more often than it won. In several draws it didn’t win a single match from the quarters onward.

The 2026 US Open main draw starts Sunday, August 30, and the brackets go live on Brckt the moment the draw is announced. Before you fill yours out, let’s look at what the summer actually taught us.

The Summer, by the Numbers

Brckt tracks every pick from every bracket, so after each event we can measure how often the crowd’s majority was right, round by round. The shape has been the same at every event since Wimbledon:

Round one: the crowd is decent. Majority pick wins about 60 to 69 percent of matches.
Round two: about the same, sometimes better.
Round of 16: the floor drops out. Between 25 and 50 percent, depending on the draw.
Quarterfinals through the final: the majority pick has lost the large majority of these matches this summer, and in some draws all of them.

Meanwhile, this summer’s Masters 1000 champions on the men’s side were each sitting in under 10 percent of brackets when the tournament started. On the women’s side, semifinalists picked by under 10 percent of brackets knocked out crowd favorites at Wimbledon, Toronto, and Cincinnati.

Names that cost the crowd the most points over the last two months: Fils, Shelton, Nakashima, Anisimova, Tien. Keep them in mind Thursday.

The crowd is fine early, then falls off a cliff exactly where the points get big.

Why This Matters for Your Points

Brckt’s featured groups use Fibonacci scoring. A correct first-round pick is worth 10 points. A correct quarterfinal is worth 80. The final is 210. So the rounds where the crowd has been going 0-for are the rounds worth eight to twenty times more than the ones where the crowd is comfortable.

If you build your bracket by asking “who does everyone think will win?”, you are optimizing for the cheap points and copying everyone else on the expensive ones. That is how you finish tied for 40th.

What Last Year’s US Open Crowd Did

We have the 2025 US Open champion picks on file. On the men’s side, 426 brackets split almost evenly: Sinner 38%, Alcaraz 36%, and nobody else above 4%. Alcaraz won, so a third of the field got the champion right and gained no ground on each other.

The women’s side is the more interesting one. Swiatek was the most-picked champion at 34%. Sabalenka, the defending champion and world number one, was second at 25%. Sabalenka won. And the runner-up, Amanda Anisimova, was picked to win the tournament by one bracket out of 201. Half a percent. That one person earned 130 finalist points that almost nobody else in the pool had.

Anisimova, by the way, has spent this summer beating crowd favorites again. Worth remembering when the draw comes out Thursday.

How Brckt Turns This Into a Better Two Weeks

None of this data is a secret, but it is hard to act on without the right tools. Here is what Brckt gives you for the US Open:

The crowd numbers, before you submit. Brckt’s AI connector plugs your account into Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible app. You can ask it which champions are over-owned, pull the community’s pick percentages for any match, and look at our daily Elo power ratings to find the matches where the ratings disagree with the seedings. This is the same data behind everything in this post, in a chat window, before the draw locks. Open AI Connect from your profile to set it up.

Live scoring after every match. Points, group standings, and the global leaderboard update the moment a match ends. When your 7% pick wins a quarterfinal at 1 AM, you will see the 80 points land before the handshake is over.

Player notifications. Favorite the players your bracket depends on and your phone tells you when they walk on court and again when they finish, with the result. US Open night sessions routinely start late and end after midnight. Let the app watch the order of play so you don’t have to. Setup takes thirty seconds.

Groups. Create a private group for your friends or join a featured group and take on the whole community. The trash talk is better when the standings are live.

Create or join a group

Three Rules for the 2026 US Open

Chalk through round two, then get brave. The data says the crowd is roughly right early and roughly wrong late. Spend your upset picks in the round of 16 and quarters, where a correct call is worth 50 to 80 points and almost nobody else has it.
Your champion pick is not where you win the pool. In 2025, 74% of men’s brackets took Sinner or Alcaraz. If you agree with the crowd on the champion, fine, but understand you have differentiated nothing. The separation comes from the finalist on the other side of the draw.
Watch the summer form, not the seeds. The players who did the most damage to brackets this summer were mostly unseeded or seeded outside the top ten. The seeding committee doesn’t care about August form. Your bracket should.

Key Dates

Draw announcement: Thursday, August 27. Brackets open on Brckt immediately after.
Main draw begins: Sunday, August 30
Picks lock: before the first ball of Round 1 on Sunday
Finals weekend: September 12 and 13

Get Your Picks In

Join or create a group now and you will get an email the moment the draw drops. Then do your homework, pick some upsets in the rounds that matter, and watch two weeks of tennis where every match is worth something.

Fill out your US Open bracket on Brckt

— Keith