Easttnken
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Win one BILLION dollars for a perfect bracket
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DeepSpringsVol
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Great article on it.
Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge: Why it’s a bad idea to enter Warren Buffett’s March Madness contest.
"There is a chance, but the chance is so vanishingly small that its actually more rational to say theres no chance. As Yahoo and Quicken note in the fine print of their rules page: odds of winning the Grand Prize are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Thats 1 in 9 quintillion and change."
Another way to think about it: If all 317 million people in the U.S. filled out a bracket at random, you could run the contest for 290 million years, and thered still be a 99 percent chance that no one had ever won.
Jeff Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University, derived a more realistic calculation that takes basketball knowledge into account. If you know the sport pretty well, he concludes, your chances of picking perfectly are more like 1 in 128 billion.
Still not so hot. As Bergen explained, that would mean youd need to fill out about 90 billion brackets before you even had a 50-50 chance to win.
ESPN has been running a large-scale bracket contest for 13 years. Nobody has ever come close to perfection, the sports networks John Diver told CNN in January. Only one person in the last seven years managed to pick just the first-round winners correctly.
Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge: Why it’s a bad idea to enter Warren Buffett’s March Madness contest.
"There is a chance, but the chance is so vanishingly small that its actually more rational to say theres no chance. As Yahoo and Quicken note in the fine print of their rules page: odds of winning the Grand Prize are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Thats 1 in 9 quintillion and change."
Another way to think about it: If all 317 million people in the U.S. filled out a bracket at random, you could run the contest for 290 million years, and thered still be a 99 percent chance that no one had ever won.
Jeff Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University, derived a more realistic calculation that takes basketball knowledge into account. If you know the sport pretty well, he concludes, your chances of picking perfectly are more like 1 in 128 billion.
Still not so hot. As Bergen explained, that would mean youd need to fill out about 90 billion brackets before you even had a 50-50 chance to win.
ESPN has been running a large-scale bracket contest for 13 years. Nobody has ever come close to perfection, the sports networks John Diver told CNN in January. Only one person in the last seven years managed to pick just the first-round winners correctly.
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