The bracket is set, which means the CB9 Bracket Challenge is open. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and your picks lock at 10:30 a.m. CT on Friday, May 29. Here is exactly how to play.

Step 1: Sign in

Head to the sign-in page and enter your email. We send a one-tap sign-in link — no password to create or remember. Click the link and your account is ready. That is the whole sign-up.

Step 2: Fill out your bracket

Go to your bracket and click teams to advance them through the rounds. There are 27 picks in total:

- 16 regional winners - 8 super regional winners - 2 College World Series finalists — one from each side of the bracket - 1 national champion

You also enter one tiebreaker: the total combined runs scored by both teams in Game 1 of the CWS Finals.

Step 3: Save — and edit until the deadline

Hit save whenever you want. You can come back and change any pick as many times as you like right up until the bracket locks. Nothing is final until then.

When picks are due

Brackets lock before first pitch of the regionals — Friday, May 29, at 10:30 a.m. CT (11:30 a.m. ET), about 30 minutes before the 11 a.m. CT games begin. Once the clock hits zero, every bracket freezes. No edits after that, so get your picks in Friday morning.

How scoring works

Every correct pick earns points, and later rounds are worth more:

- Each correct regional winner: 10 points - Each correct super regional winner: 20 points - Each correct CWS finalist (two of them): 40 points - Correct national champion: 80 points

Add it up and a perfect bracket is worth 480 base points (16×10 + 8×20 + 2×40 + 80) — before bonuses.

Upset bonuses

Calling an upset is rewarded. When the team you correctly advanced was the lower seed, you earn a bonus equal to the seed difference, capped at +10 on any single game.

- In a regional, a 4-seed that wins it all over the 1-seed earns +3. - In a super regional, a national-seed underdog — or an unseeded team — that knocks off a top national seed can earn up to the full +10.

Bonuses stack on top of the base points, so a bold-but-correct bracket can out-score a chalk one.

Tiebreaker and the leaderboard

The leaderboard ranks everyone by total points. If two players tie, the closer tiebreaker guess (combined runs in CWS Finals Game 1) wins. And if your national champion gets knocked out, your bracket is marked "busted" — but it keeps scoring every other pick you got right, so you stay on the board.

That is it. Sign in, fill out your bracket, and lock it in before 10:30 a.m. CT on Friday, May 29.