The first round of March Madness starts tonight. If you're still filling out your bracket, here are four tips from mathematicians that could help:

1. Don't let bias come into play. In other words, don't pick Boise State to win it all just because you went to Boise State. They're an 11 seed, and no one above an eight seed has won before.

2. Don't pick Kentucky to lose, just to be different. They're the favorite because they're undefeated. 

Nate Silver is the statistics guy who predicted almost everything right in the 2008 election. He's calculated that Kentucky has a 41 percent chance of winning, followed by Villanova at 11 percent and Wisconsin at 10 percent.

3. Don't pick any team lower than a five seed to win it all — meaning a number six seed, a number 10 seed. The higher the number, the lower ranked they are.  

According to Silver, any team with a lower seed than that has less than a 1 percent chance of winning.  Utah is the only five seed that has at least a 1 percent chance.

4.  Look at who's been winning recently. A math professor in North Carolina had a cheerleader fill out a bracket last year after looking at teams that won a bunch of games late in the season — she beat 96 percent of all the brackets on ESPN.com.