Submission + - Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion for the Perfect March Madness Bracket
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Rob Wile reports that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans are partnering to award anyone who fills out a perfect 2014 Men's NCAA Tournament bracket with $1 billion. The prize will be paid out in 40 annual installments of $25 million. If there's more than one winner they'll have to share or the winner or winners can also take or split up an immediate $500 million lump sum payment. "We've seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth?" says Jay Farner, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Quicken Loans. "We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat." You might consider the odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket to be small and you would be right. According to DePaul math professor Jay Bergen. the odds are 1 in 128 billion. (Some outlets are quoting 1 in 9.2 quintillion, but that assumes that all 63 games are 50-50 toss-ups, which they're not. For example, Number 1 seeds just about always advance to the second round.) If everyone in the United States filled out a bracket, Chris Chase calculated, we'd get a $1 billion winner every 400 years. "So Buffett and Quicken Loans are "offering" $1 billion for the perfect bracket the way I'm now (officially) "offering" $1 billion to anybody who, in the next week, guesses the names of every sitting member of the House of Representatives in 2020 says Derek Thompson.
