According to Warren Buffet, it is if you pick all 63 games right.
http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/eye-on-college-basketball/244...
I know we're still almost 2 months away from the start of the tournament, but figured I'd post since it was just announced today.
Keep in mind that the "9.2 quintillion" number assumes that each team has a 50% chance of winning each game. If you assume that all the #1, #2 and #3 seeds make it to the second round (dangerous, but statistically sound), that betters the odds to about 2.25 quadrillion. It would take a much better statistical mind than mine to analyze trends based on the proper teams to pick to see what your "best odds" of picking the bracket are.
Forums:
DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.
Comments
It doesn't matter what you know about basketball, the people who know the least always end up winning the pools.
Hear. hear. It's always the weird cat lady in Logistics that picks Brown to beat Syracuse because brown is her favorite color who wins the pool at the end.
my bracket isn't worth a $3 bill.
I'll win Warren Buffett's 1 billion prize because my detachment from basketball is so great, my bracket will be flawless.
I want a link to where I try. I think every person with a computer will submit one for a chance at a billion.
I think it is any perfect bracket - so if you fill out one on cbssports.com, espn.com, yahoo.com, etc - you're automatically entered.
I doubt it. It's partially a promotion with Quicken Loans, where the top 20 finishers get 100,000 towards the purchase of a new home.
Ahh, good call - this is true.
I doubt it's available yet. I'm sure it'll come up a little closer to March.
Maybe that's really the challenge. Make your bracket now, if it's perfect...$1 billion for you. That would ensure they wouldn't have to pay out the money.
So how long until someone writes a program to make every possible bracket outcome?
It would be pretty easy to write a program for every bracket outcome (although you'd probably need more computational power than what most personal computers can supply), but then you would just have something like 9.2 x 10^18 brackets. The problem would be figuring out a way to enter them all.
MORE INFO:
There is a limit of 1 entry per household, and a total cap of 10 million entries, as per this other article:
http://www.parade.com/255536/erinhill/hes-gone-mad-warren-buffett-offers...
Although I have no idea where their "odds" come from near the end of the article. 1 in 2^32?
So I will be trying to be one of 10,000,000 to get a chance at one in 4,500,000,000 of guessing right.
That 4.5 billion number is bogus. It is exactly equal to 2^32, which would mean if you had 32 games which were all toss-ups (50% chance for each team to win) that would be your odds to pick them all. Since NCAAT brackets include 63 games, the "true odds" would be about 9,200,000,000,000,000,000. However, that doesn't include the fact that the 1 seeds are probably 99% likely to win their first game, and the 2 seeds are probably 95% likely to win their first game, etc. I'd imagine that the odds are still near a trillion to 1 for someone using statistical analysis of past tournaments to pick their bracket.
As the reigning TKP Bracket Champion I'd like to throw my hat in the ring. I can pull this off.