Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2014. It reports news from that month about the 2014 Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket challenge, including registration from 3 March 2014 and the previous season’s 8.1 million brackets. The contest is long over.
No catch, no tricks: Warren Buffett will give a billion dollars to anyone who picks the winner of every game in the NCAA’s “March Madness”, according to Yahoo Finance. It is probably the juiciest prize in history, but it is probably also one of the toughest probability challenges of all time, since the championship involves 63 or 64 teams competing for the title in single-game knockout rounds.
Mathematically, the odds are one in 9.2 quintillion, or a 9 followed by 18 zeros. Put another way: you are more likely to be struck by lightning 18 times in less than three hours on a sunny day.
Last season 8.1 million brackets were filled in and none was correct. It is not impossible to get it right, but it would all come down to chance.
If you were the lucky one, you would not get the money all at once. It would be paid in 40 annual instalments of $25 million each, which isn’t bad either. Also interesting: there are 20 prizes of $100,000 for the 20 people who, without getting everything right, come closest to the final results.
From 3 March, anyone interested can start signing up for the contest. Only the first 10 million entrants will be accepted. The bad news is that you have to be over 21 and American.
You can follow everything about the contest on the Quicken Loans Facebook page. Good luck to all the participants. They’re going to need it.
Further reading
Featured image: Blervis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
