By now, you’ve likely heard about Warren Buffett’s offer to pay out ONE BILLION DOLLARS to the person who registers and wins a 100% PERFECT BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT BRACKET. (Note that they are not allowed to use the term “March Madness”, as Yahoo! Sports and Quicken Loans are not official sponsors of the tournament.
So what are your actual chances of winning that $1 Billion Grand Prize?
NCAA Basketball Championship Tournament Bracket
At first glance, Web Watch would tell you: pretty darn close to zero.
That’s right, we’d tell you that you have absolutely no chance in hell of winning that billion dollars.
According to USAToday, it’s not quite that bad.
You actually do have a 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808 chance of submitting a perfect bracket. For those of you without a math background, that’s slightly more than nine quintillion, 223 quadrillion… to one.
A one in 9 quintillion chance of winning a billion dollars? No wonder they are officially capping the number of possible entries to just the first 15 million submitted.
But let’s backtrack a bit.
If you’ve been reading Web Watch for a number of years, you’ll know that we’ve provided you umpteen different ways to PICK A WINNING BRACKET. If you’re just a little bit smart about how you make your selections, you actually can take that nine quintillion and pare it down to a more reasonable 1:128 Billion chance of winning the Warren Buffett challenge.
That’s a dramatic increase in your odds of winning, wouldn’t you say?
Is that even worth your effort to try to win? Web Watch says, heck yeah! First, it’s free to enter. And secondly, who wouldn’t want to have a chance to win $1 Billion? How can you NOT do this?
So go and review all our previous Web Watch articles on HOW TO PICK A WINNING BRACKET and keep us posted on how you’ve done.