Everyone wants to have a chance to get a billion dollars. Now, you can try your hand at winning the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. But what are the odds?
Warren Buffett, considered one of the wealthiest people in the world, has teamed up with Quicken Loans for a billion dollar challenge. All participants have to do is predict the winners for all the NCAA games tournament, which is 63 games all in all.
To start participating, contestants must go to Yahoo and create an account. The next step is to predict all the winners and then wait for the basketball games to begin.
The odds of picking a perfect winning streak for 63 games are one in 9.2 quintillion, or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
According to one mathematics professor at DePaul University, Jeffrey Bergen, those odds are not actually correct, as high-ranking teams typically win games. This lowers the odds to about one in 128 billion. That is, if the contestant has knowledge in collegiate basketball.
Another mathematics professor from Duke University, Ezra Miller, is giving a different number. According to his calculations, the odds of winning are 148 pentillion to 1. He says, “It’s the chance of picking an atom out of a snowstorm.”
Since the start of ESPN’s competition in 1998, no one has ever predicted a winning bracket among the 30 million entries that were received. If this streak continues, Quicken will be awarding $100,000 to each of the contestants that predict the closest brackets.
Buffet, 83, is a philanthropist, investor, and business magnate who loves to dabble in these sorts of things . He has been Tiger Woods’ caddie, and has also been a financial adviser for LeBron James. According to Buffet, he came up with the billion bracket challenge while sitting on his chair in his office. “I did the calculations. Took me about 10 or 15 minutes. I hope I did it right,” he said.
The Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge has been getting a lot of media attention since its announcement. Moreover, reports say that Buffet will be given a fee just for being an investor in the challenge.
John Diver from ESPN said that he does not want to say the chance of winning is impossible, “but it’s basically impossible.”
Buffett told Los Angeles Times in an interview that in case a participant gets to predict 60 games, he will try to buy them out with a $100 million before they get the billion. “I’m not sure Quicken would let me do that, but if I offered you $100 million to call off the bet, I bet you’d take it,” he said.
Those who are interested to join the contest must do so immediately, as they are capping off the number of participants at 15 million.
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