The Billion Dollar Bracket: Forget It, You Have No Chance Of Beating Warren Buffett

The Billion Dollar Bracket. If you are a college basketball fan, or just a fan of becoming a billionaire overnight, you have certainly heard of it by now. The Inquisitr told you about it weeks ago. All you have to do is fill your NCAA March Madness bracket like you usually would, submit to to the Quicken Loans/Warren Buffett Billion Dollar Bracket contest and — slam dunk!

You’re a billionaire!

Well, if you can predict every single one of the 63 NCAA Men’s Tournament games correctly.

But how hard can that be, right? You’re an expert. You watch college hoops six or seven nights a week. Might as well give it a shot.

Sure, except there’s one problem. Even if you are an expert — that is even if you are the world’s most obsessive college basketball junkie — a leading mathematician says the odds against you are 128 billion to one.

Just by comparison, your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are a relatively breezy 258,890,000 to one. In other words, you could win the Mega Millions lottery’s top prize almost 500 times before you win the Billion Dollar Bracket once.

And that is if you’re a college basketball expert. According to DePaul University mathematician Jeffrey Bergen, picking all 63 games at random — in other words, effectively tossing a coin 63 times — makes the odds against you in the Billion Dollar Bracket 9.2 quintillion to one.

That is not a typo. We just said 9.2 quintillion to one. A “9,” a “2,” and 17 zeros. To one.

So forget tossing a coin. Let’s just talk about that 128 billion to one chance you’ll have in the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge if you’re an expert.

“If you have a favorite baseball team, they are more likely to win the next seven consecutive World Series than you are — with knowledge of basketball — to get a perfect bracket,” Bergen explained.

Bergen also says that you have a better chance of flipping a coin and having it come up heads 37 times in a row than you have of winning the Billion Dollar Bracket.

So what’s the point of the Billion Dollar Bracket? Simple. Marketing. The game’s sponsors Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway are already getting millions of dollars in essentially free advertising from media coverage not unlike the article you are reading right now.

And the odds that they will have to give away the top prize in the Billion Dollar Bracket are effectively zero.

But if you want to fill out your Billion Dollar Bracket, go ahead. We won’t stop you. Neither will Warren Buffett.