Warren Buffet Introduces Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge

Do you want to win $1 billion dollars and the greatest bragging rights in sports history? It’s actually very simple. All you have to do is enter multi-billionaire Warren Buffet’s Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. To enter, contestants must go on Yahoo and be one of the first 15 million people to fill out an NCAA bracket for the men’s college basketball tournament, March Madness. If your bracket is absolutely perfect and you can predict the winner of all 63 games, you will get a check for $1,000,000,000.

However, your odds of winning are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. 1 in 92,000,000,000,000,000,000. This number comes from pure probability, but if we consider the fact that teams with higher rankings will most likely beat out the lower ranked teams, your chances of winning are significantly higher. A math professor at DePaul University, Jeffrey Bergen, predicts that these odds jump to 1 in 128 billion. Still, that’s 1 in 128,000,000,000.

Since the beginning of ESPN’s bracket competition in 1998, a total of 0 perfect brackets have been filled out. It’s likely that Mr. Buffett is entirely aware of these odds even though money is not much of a concern to him, one of the wealthiest people in the world. Nonetheless, Quicken Loans paid Buffett an undisclosed amount of money to insure the competition and the odds are he will most likely keep the profit.

Despite the fact that the odds are overwhelming against everyone who enters the competition, it is all in good fun. The contest itself is marketing and public relations genius for Quicken Loans. Yahoo, the NCAA, NBC, ABC, ESPN, and all the other stations airing March Madness will likely receive increased television ratings and publicity as people wait to find out if they will be the billionaire with the perfect bracket.