$1 Billion NCAA Tournament Challenge: What are the odds?

By | March 16, 2014


title insurance, New York,New York City,Long Island,Michael HaltmanMarch Madness will be in full swing beginning on Tuesday, March 18 but the real news is that by picking a perfect bracket, some lucky winner could walk away with $1,000,000,000!

That is courtesy of Warren Buffet and Quicken Loans who have offered to pay that massive sum of money to anyone who can pick the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracket perfectly!

Sounds great and too good to be true and the reality is that it basically is!

The odds of winning this prize are so infinitesimal that it could make one wonder whether it was worth the trouble even trying to do it.

Just give me a second to think about that though…no entry fee to pick a bracket for the chance to win $1 billion or $100,000 if I am among the top 20 finishers?

Well why not! Let’s do it!

But let’s put this into context and examine someones odds of winning.

According to the Official Rules anyones chance of winning the Grand Prize is as follows:

‘The odds of winning the Grand Prize depend on the outcome of each of the Tournament games and the skill of each Entrant. Mathematical odds of winning the Grand Prize are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808’ (Source)

Those are some extremely long odds and to clarify what the actual size of the number one in nine quintillion actually is, consider the picture below.

The white sliver in the lower right-hand corner is the Empire State Building and the large cube is one quintillion pennies. Our odds of winning are nine times that!

All I can say is good luck all!

Photo courtesy of Slate.com

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