麻豆影院

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Feeling lucky? The odds behind a picking a perfect NCAA bracket
March 16, 2016听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Mark Ablowitz
For the millions out there readying to fill out their 2016 NCAA basketball tournament brackets for your office pools in hopes of picking every winner, good luck. You鈥檒l need it.
What are the odds of filling out a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket, picking all 63 games correctly? According to 麻豆影院 Professor Mark Ablowitz, former chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics, they are breathtaking.
CUT 1 鈥淚t鈥檚 very, very large - 10 to the 18th. It鈥檇 be very unlikely that people could do it on a random basis of choosing like a coin toss because you take factors of one-half to a very large power. (:17) And when you get up to very large numbers like in the 30s and 40s and higher then numbers get out of hand quickly.鈥� (:28)
That鈥檚 about 1 in 9.2 quintillion, or 1 in 9,223,000,000,000,000,000 for someone picking winners of each game randomly, like a coin flip, says Ablowitz, noting anyone with some knowledge of college basketball can up their odds a bit.
CUT 2 鈥淭hat鈥檚 an enormous number and it鈥檚 very, very poor odds. To get all 63 I think you should be content if you can get well more than two-thirds. (:11) And you could look at odds makers and take a few that have done a good job in the past and average the results and I think you would improve yourself but still getting all 60 some odd teams would be very hard.鈥� (:25)
There are other NCAA tournament bets with somewhat better odds, says Ablowitz, like waiting to pick the winner of the final eight teams, the odds are 1 in just 128 if selected randomly.
CUT 3 鈥淭hen it鈥檚 much more reasonable - one in a hundred and some. And that鈥檚 when, I think, you could really help yourself by looking at odds makers.鈥� (:12)
The odds are so infinitesimal that Warren Buffet鈥檚 $1 billion offer in 2015 for anyone on Earth filling out a perfect NCAA bracket went unclaimed. And while he not offering $1 billion this year he is offering to his Berkshire Hathaway employees $1 million every year, for life if 鈥渉e or she predicts the Sweet Sixteen round perfectly.鈥�
CUT 4 鈥淒oes he still have his million-dollar prize available? It鈥檚 very unlikely he鈥檚 going to have to pay out. (:07)
According to a 2015 report by the global job search company, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., U.S. employers lose about $1.9 billion in wages during March Madness because of distracted basketball buffs. The American Gaming Association recently estimated that roughly 70 million people participate in NCAA tournament office pools. 听
-CU-