You Can Be A Billionaire!
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 2:57 pm
But don't start taking out loans against your winnings, just yet:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... s/6410185/Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett are offering up to 15 million people a very, very, very small chance to win a very, very, very big prize — a billion dollars for filling out a perfect NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket.
No one in recorded history has done it. "People realize it's a long shot,'' says Jeff Bergen, a mathematician at DePaul University in Chicago. "They don't realize how long.''
The tournament's field and pairings are announced Sunday. Since the Quicken contest to predict its outcome has no entry fee, many entrants presumably will enter knowing nothing of men's college basketball, other than they'd like to make a billion bucks off it.
Result: A lot of brackets are going to border on random selection, which means winning is going to take a lot of luck.
How much luck? Bergen says the chance of randomly predicting the outcome of the main draw's 63 games is one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
Still, the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge has an appeal.
"How many ways can you make March Madness fresh?'' asks Brad Carlin, professor of something called biostatistics at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and an amateur bracketologist who admits he's intrigued by what amounts to a stunt.
"A billion is a big number,'' he says. "It's a bet the bookies won't take.''
Jason Mandel, a Philadelphia legal recruiter who's run the Mandel Madness tournament pool for the last 21 years, agrees: "It's a great piece of marketing, a great gimmick.''
Don't be totally discouraged by those long odds. With a modicum of knowledge, you can improve them.
For instance, a No. 1 (highest) seed has never lost to a No. 16 (lowest) seed in any of the four regional tournaments into which the big one is divided since 1985.
With information like that, Bergen estimates, you can significantly reduce the odds against you … to 128 billion to 1.[Okay, now we're talkin!]
That means you'd still have less chance of winning the billion than of:
Seeing your favorite team win the next seven World Series.
Predicting which political party will win the presidency in every election from 2016 through 2160 (assuming the winner is always a Republican or a Democrat).
Flipping a coin and getting heads 37 times in a row.
"It's highly, highly, highly unlikely anyone will win,'' Bergen says, "but you can still have fun with it.''
The Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge is backed by an insurance policy issued by a company in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. The contest is limited to 15 million individuals, each of whom can submit one bracket.
In addition to the big prize, Quicken will award $100,000 for each of the contest's 20 most accurate brackets.
Players, who must register online through Yahoo! Sports, have until 1 a.m. ET Thursday to submit their selections. The tournament's first 16 games are played later that day.
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