Winning The WSOP Main Event Three Times In A Row More Likely Than Perfect NCAA Bracket

The first round of the 2014 NCAA men’s college basketball tournament kicks off on Wednesday, and one bracket contest seems to be the talk of the American sports world.

In January, it was announced that billionaire Warren Buffet had agreed to insure a promotion by Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans, where a perfect bracket earns a participant $1 billion. Much smaller prizes are to be won for less-than-perfect brackets.

The promotion is expected to be a boon for Quicken Loans, thanks to the basically free advertising and getting millions to supply the mortgage lender with key personal information.

The odds of filling out a perfect bracket, if one flipped a coin for all the games, is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. To be precise, it’s 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

Obviously, people don’t blindly fill out brackets that way. One mathematician at DePaul University reportedly pegged it at 1 in around 128 billion.

That’s much better than the former, which probably wouldn’t have occurred yet if everyone in the U.S. had been filling out brackets at random once a year since the Big Bang.

You’d likely have a better chance at winning the World Series of Poker main event, these days with 6,000-player fields, three times in a row than if you filled out a bracket that way.

Buffet, who has a net worth of around $53.5 billion, is also insuring a contest that is capped at 15 million entries, which makes it even more impossible for a perfect bracket to be had.

While Buffet and Gilbert have safe bets here, some bookmakers in Las Vegas are less than thrilled with the seeding. One told the Las Vegas Sun that this year is “probably the hardest bracket I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Silver State casinos won around $200 million from sports gamblers in 2013.

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