Who's up for a challenge to win a billion?

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/21/news/companies/buffett-ncaa-bracket/

If people are willing to do this, we agree up front to devise a strategy to go in together and split winnings if we win it. Of course, I would want to take the $500M payout too. Whoever actually did the bracket gets to attend the game.

Who's in?

In:

Card
JQK
IP
Bass***
Jay
Syndicate
droski
Norris
Indy
NYY
dknash
gbc
kb
invol
lumber
rb
hh
beech

*** - in, but we may hunt him down and kill him

 

I'll do it

 

There are more than 9 quintillion possible ways to fill out the 64-team bracket, according to the math and science site Orgtheory.net. That's 9 million-trillion, or 9 followed by 18 zeros. That makes it a far longer shot than the one in 259 million odds of winning the grand prize in MegaMillions or the one in 175 million odds of winning Powerball's top prize.

not really true given the fact that you can pretty much assume a 13th-16th seed wont get to say the final four, let alone win it.

 

3.93% IRR

would be a sucker to take the payout over the 40 years.

 

Had a bracket in the top 1200 last year on espn...

 

Assume #1-4 seeds win first game and #1 seeds also win second, and the odds are still ~1 in 9000000000000.

 

Yup. It makes zero sense to ever take the payout. Always take the lump sum. Always.

 

wonder if you could make a computer program that could submit that many brackets. I imagine they have a limit to the amount per person.

 

One submission a second and you would only take 285388 years, longer than the homo sapiens species has been on the planet

 

I'm in.

 

The odds are assuming totally random chance. While chance plays a large role in a game and in an entire tournament, we all know it isn't purely chance.

We don't need to submit every possible outcome.

 

fine!

 

hell. if you just pick the favorites every year you have a good chance of winning your company bracket challenge. my brother in law does this and has won 3 out of the last 4 years. if you limited it to a certain number of upsets maybe you can get it down to a manageable number.

 

That's my thought.

Develop a plan, delegate it, and go from there. I figure at best we're looking at 2,000 or so entries, but they all need to be calculated ones.

 

I think you'd need at least 100K to have any sort of chance. but a good programmer could do that easily.

 

Agreed. These are free lottery tickets. If we have a system, we can whittle the odds down some. Not saying we are going to win, but I think an organized effort really could get lucky.

 

The first step will be looking at Round 1, and determine what is pretty much impossible.

 

And the more people that are in, the better the chance.

 

I'm in - but if I win I'm going to pretend I did it myself.

 

Bassman is not in.