NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - One game down, 63 to go in the NCAA championship tournament. If you're going to get in on your office March Madness Pool, you'll have to get your selections in before tipoff of the first game on Thursday.

5 Tips is here to tell you how you can get a leg up on the competition.

More than half of all employees take part in March Madness betting pools, according to online career site Vault.com. By the letter of the law, filling out those $5 NCAA tournament sheets could land you in jail for 6 months or have you paying $1,000 in fines, says Rod Kurtz of Inc. Magazine.

But the good news is most employers (and law enforcement officials) take a benign view of the March ritual. In fact, only 23 percent of employers have formal policies against the office pool.

"Companies are using this as a way to rally employees" says Kurtz. "They are looking at this as the cost of doing business."

But if you want to make sure you're not going to be wearing an orange jumpsuit because of your betting participation, make sure the winnings will be distributed among the players. You don't want to use the telephone or the Internet to operate the pool.

Keep the betting to your office only. You don't want to involve employees across state lines, even if they do work for the same company, says Wesley Cochran, a law professor at Texas Tech University. "Most prosecutors have bigger fish to fry than office poolers," he says.

We all know those guys who eat, sleep and breathe March Madness. They follow all the teams...they talk incessantly about games. They know their final four. But guess what? They pick winners less often than people with only moderate sports knowledge.

A recent New York University study indicates that people with some sports knowledge were able to pick winners about 50 percent of the time, while the most knowledgeable sports fans pick winners only 30 percent of the time.

"Sports fans have clouded judgment about teams," says Kurtz.

There are roughly eighteen billion billion different team combinations. In case you're wondering, that looks like 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.

To maximize your chances of winning, some experts say you should work backward by picking the tournament's overall winner and then the final four and so on. This way you're looking at the teams relative to the competition, not just individual games. And in most pools, you get more points for accurately picking the winners in later rounds.

Teams in the tournament are ranked largely by how well they played during the season. But you want to choose a few underdogs. This will help to differentiate your list from everyone else's, and because there are always some upsets. Remember that picking winners that most people don't is more valuable.

Of course, it's unlikely that a team ranked number one would lose to a team ranked 16th. In fact, that's never happened. But if you're going to bet against a higher ranked team, you may want to bet against the fifth seed. Historically there is a 50/50 chance the fifth seed will be upset.

There are 63 games in the NCAA tournament and for the most part, teams will have to play in unfamiliar territory, away from their fan base and perhaps dealing with hostile crowds and other inconveniences. You'll want to pick teams that have a record of winning games on the road.

You can check out the teams' away game record at any major sports sites like www.sportsillustrated.cnn.com or www.espn.com. If a team wins two out of three away, that's excellent, says R.J. Bell of Pregame.com. But he also cautions to stay away from teams that don't win at least half of their games on the road.

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Gerri Willis is a personal finance editor for CNN Business News and the host for Open House. E-mail comments to 5tips@cnn.com.