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Out of 15M brackets, none remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet

94 points| callmevlad | 12 years ago |tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com | reply

Original title: Out of 15M brackets, only 1 remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-longer-any-perfect-brackets-left-in-the-billion-dollar-bracket-challenge-003853949.html

78 comments

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[+] thrush|12 years ago|reply
There are currently still 3 perfect brackets on ESPN.

  1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=576318
  1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=4155737
  1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=10928050
http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/e...
[+] sharkweek|12 years ago|reply
Had a perfect first day -- then the first game today completely wrecked my bracket - but on the bright side I always enjoy seeing Duke lose
[+] jw2013|12 years ago|reply
Now they are all done. Thanks, SF Austin. I got it wrong, too.
[+] jefft|12 years ago|reply
Not anymore: SFA 77 VCU 75
[+] jerf|12 years ago|reply
From a game design standpoint, that was one problem with this design. Since half the tournament occurs in the first round (well, not counting the wildcard round), there's no drama; everyone gets shot down immediately. In the movie version of this, it'll come down to at least the Final Four before our hero gets knocked out, no matter how implausible the odds of making it that far are.
[+] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
There's usually perfect brackets a couple rounds in. This year was rough. While the first round has half the games, they're usually a lot more predictable than later rounds.

This is probably my worst first round ever, anecdotally.

[+] catshirt|12 years ago|reply
ha i don't know- i thought the anti-climax was kind of great. speaks to the math really.
[+] bluedevil2k|12 years ago|reply
A friend and I today discussed if you had a perfect bracket after the great 8 round, going into the Final 4, would you, and for how much, sell a stake in your bracket to hedge your money?

The numbers, though it's a "billion $" bracket, that's actually $25M over 40 years, or an optional $300M single payout. In the US, you could expect about 55% of that after taxes, so $165M. There are 3 games left at the Final 4 game.

[+] fsk|12 years ago|reply
In an interview, Warren Buffet suggested that if someone was perfect at the Final Four, he'd offer to buy them out for the EV (or even half the EV). If you aren't already rich, you'd be an idiot to not take his offer. It pays for Warren Buffet to buy someone out for their EV, because that minimizes HIS risk.

Even if the person refused the offer, Warren Buffet could go to Vegas and bet on the last couple of games, as a hedge.

Even if you're perfect at the sweet 16 (which has never happened), with 15 games left (assuming each is a coinflip), your EV is 1/2^15 ~ 1 in 32000, so your bracket is only worth $300M/32000 ~ $9k.

[+] jowiar|12 years ago|reply
I would imagine most people would hedge at least one round earlier. A perfect bracket going into the elite 8 would have an expected value of ~1M after tax. Nobody would ride it past then. Of course, you end up running a 1/128 chance of being the unhappiest winner of a million bucks ever.

I actually think that if anyone had gotten through this weekend clean (48/48) the expected value is 9k pretax, and I think most would take that.

[+] jw2013|12 years ago|reply
If these four teams are equally competent. Then you have 50% chance to choose each of three correct (2 final four games + 1 title games correctly). So the chance to win it all is (1/2)^3 = 0.125. Your expected return is $1B * 55% * 0.125 = $68.75M.

Or if you prefer a single payout, $300M * 0.125 = $37.5M. So considering inflation for $68.75M is over 40 years, maybe your expected return is between 37.5M to 50M (idk about 50M, I made it up)? Of course the reality is how much you would sell it very much depend on your conviction of how likely your guesses on final 3 games may be correct.

[+] bluedevil2k|12 years ago|reply
Math says you'd be willing to sell a 50% stake for $10M. Sad to think that compared to the "billion $" headlines.
[+] Alex_MJ|12 years ago|reply
From a "get people to play with numbers" perspective, this was actually a pretty cool challenge on Warren Buffet's part. Most people are going to spray-and-pray (my facebook feed is full of facetious "shit, there goes my billion dollars") but I would be surprised if there weren't a large number of people who put more effort than they otherwise would have into trying to figure out statistical models for who wins basketball games.
[+] creade|12 years ago|reply
It's not in the article but my guess would be that none of Warren Buffet's money was ever actually on the line. The last time Pepsi had a contest for $1 Billion, they bought insurance against someone meeting the conditions to win the prize. Who'd they buy that insurance from? Berkshire Hathaway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Billion_Dollar_Sweepstake...

[+] curiouscats|12 years ago|reply
Right, same deal this time as I remember reading about it. It is funny that Buffet gets most of the PR when Buffett's company is just making a fortune insuring against a very unlikely outcome. Normally the crazy people marketing the potential $1B payout (that buy insurance from some boring insurance company) would get the PR.
[+] PhantomGremlin|12 years ago|reply
Assuming you could pick game winners with 80% probability, your odds of selecting a perfect 63 game bracket are less than 1 in a million. I.e.

   >>> .8 ** 63
   7.846377169233378e-07
Even at 90%, your odds are little better than 1 in a thousand:

   >>> .9 ** 63
   0.0013100205086376223
Needless to say, I didn't even bother entering.
[+] Afforess|12 years ago|reply
What? You didn't take 1 in a million odds because? The challenge was free. I took the challenge (and lost). To dismiss the challenge because of the long odds is silly. You left a free lunch on the table.
[+] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
LOL, this is hilarious. I was talking to my Girlfriend and all of my friends and I told them: You have a better probability, after being born, of becoming a billionaire just because you're alive versus you wining Warren Buffet's money. Then they countered, with: But if we play, we at least have some chance. I just laughed and got back to programming.
[+] 6thSigma|12 years ago|reply
Buffet said he calculated what he thought the odds were of a perfect bracket and took a premium on top of that. I wonder what return he got on his $1B bet.
[+] magikbum|12 years ago|reply
Actually down to just 1 at the time of 10 PM EST on Friday
[+] runevault|12 years ago|reply
Upsets are common. However so many of them appeared I'm completely unsurprised the money is already safe. Watching brackets in my company pool crumble left and right had been crazy.

With weighted results, I wonder what the odds of this set of outcomes happening even was (note, some of the "upsets" by seed weren't really, like the CU vs Pitt game where Pitt ran them over).

[+] xefer|12 years ago|reply
What am I missing...? The top bracket is still perfect, currently 30/30 and their pick is leading in the other two games
[+] dperfect|12 years ago|reply
From what I can tell, the still-perfect bracket is not in the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, but just at the top of the overall leaderboard among all brackets/pools on Yahoo.
[+] waylandsmithers|12 years ago|reply
They should have put more emphasis on the top 20 non-perfects winning 100k. That's still pretty good! But I suppose the goal was harvesting information for quicken loans so mission accomplished.
[+] thejosh|12 years ago|reply
So I have absolutely no idea how this works, but I've seen it around a lot.

So I assume that you can enter once, how many unique entries would there need to be to actually get a combination that would win?

[+] cheeyoonlee|12 years ago|reply
We have a better chance winning the Mega Millions jackpot