Every March, some huge prizes are offered for anyone who can correctly pick the winners of NCAA men’s college basketball tournament games. Yahoo is offering $10,000 for the best bracket. I’ve seen gambling sites that put up as much as $10 million for a perfect bracket.
The odds of winning are tremendously slim--more slim than you could possible imagine. Filling out a perfect bracket means correcting predicting the outcome of 63 games. If the probability of each team winning is one-half, that would mean your chance of perfection is one in two to the 63rd power, or one in nine million trillion. One Yale statistician states you are about 60 billion times more likely to win the multistate Powerball lottery.
Currently, my bracket is in 490,105th place on Yahoo, falling in the 82nd percentile. That means I’ve picked more correctly than 82 percent of other people who filled out brackets on Yahoo. I’m slightly embarrassed, but it just goes to show you how difficult the task of filling out a winning bracket is. The current leader has selected 37 of 40 games correctly, but this individual has Illinois going to the Final Four. Because Illinois will be eliminated later today by Kansas, this guy has a slim chance of winning the overall cash prize. (Think I’m biased?)
Of course, each game is not simply a coin flip. Some teams are better than others. Even if you are a basketball fanatic, the most generous estimate I was able to find for the chance of a perfect bracket is 1 in 150 million. For instance, a 16 seed has never defeated a 1 seed. Only four 15 seeds have defeated 2 seeds. That means the probability of you choosing the winner in these scenarios increases greatly assuming you choose the higher seed.
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