Warren Buffett Bets You Won’t Have a Perfect March Madness Bracket

The exact chances of nailing the winner of all 63 games are incalculable. “There are no true odds on something like this,” Buffett said in an interview. “Einstein himself could not figure out the odds.”

But they are wildly astronomical even by the most generous assessments. A previous Wall Street Journal survey of mathematicians pegged them anywhere between 1 in 150 million and 1 in 9 million trillion. Last season, the odds of pre-tournament favorites winning every game were roughly 1 in 3 billion, said the basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy. Buffett crunched the numbers himself but declined to reveal his own estimate. “I’m not telling you that!” he said.

Anyone here think they have a good chance of putting together the perfect bracket when March Madness comes around soon? Warren Buffett doesn’t think you have a good chance. In fact, Warren Buffett thinks your odds are so terrible that he is willing to write a $1 billion check to the person who comes up with a perfect NCAA tournament bracket, because when you are wealthy you can offer that kind of thing and mean it. My method of putting together brackets has been doing it by “feel” rather than knowledge of any of the teams, so I probably won’t be sitting with Warren Buffett at the final game while he roots against me, but maybe that person will be you.

Photo: kitay

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