In two days, the Madness of March begins as the Round of 64 gets underway in the NCAA Tournament.
Until then, brackets will be filled out by millions and millions of people, some doing it for fun and others doing it in the hopes of getting rich quick.
The easiest way to cash in would be if you are an employee of investor Warren Buffett, who once again is offering his employees a chance to win some money.
Back in 2014, Buffett offered $1 billion to anyone who had a perfect bracket (nobody did), and last year, he said if anyone at his company got the correct Sweet 16, he'd pay them $1 million every year for the rest of their lives.
That offer still stands this year, but Buffett is making things even more interesting by offering up $1 million for anyone in his company who can pick a perfect opening round of the tournament.
Correctly picking 32 games doesn't seem so insurmountable, right? Well, according to the odds, as per FTW and DePaul University math professor Jeff Bergen, it's much easier than a perfect bracket, but it's still ridiculously hard to pull off.
Jeff told FTW that completely guessing 32 games correctly without using data or past knowledge gives you 1 in 4,294,967,296 odds of hitting a perfect opening round.
At least those odds are much better than a perfect bracket, but only by like a little less than a 124 billion.
The odds do get better, however, if you pick all of the higher seeds winning their opening round game (1 in 17,000), but it's March Madness for crying out loud.
Upsets happen all the time, especially in the first round. Of the 32 opening round games last March, for example, there were 13 'upsets.' (lower seed beating higher seed).
In conclusion, good luck.
(H/T: FTW)
