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Warren Buffett is doing it right. The dude can garner great publicity by playing the role of Robin Hood while not giving up any of his $75 billion net worth. That’s exactly what he’s doing with these March Madness offers. The 86-year-old mega investor offered his Berkshire Hathaway employees $1 million dollars for a perfect first round NCAA tourney bracket. That’s 32 games guessed correctly. Doesn’t seem all that impossible, right?
Welp,technically it’s possible, but so is Ryan Leaf making an NFL comeback.
The dudes over at For The Win called DePaul University math professor Jeff Bergen to iron out the odds of hitting a perfect first round. Jeff is the same man who calculated the odds of guessing all 67 games correctly. The answer: one in 128 billion, or, the probability of Grayson Allen making it through the entire tournament without pouting.
Bergen told For The Win that the odds of guessing all 32 first round games correctly, without data or analysis, is the equivalent of flipping a coin 32 times and always landing heads. In other words, the odds are a favorable 1 in 4,294,967,296.
“To put that in perspective, that’s 15 times harder than winning the lottery with one ticket,” Bergen said.
Bergen said that if you just choose the higher seeds to win each first round game, your odds are increased to the tune of 1 in 17,000.
Moral of the story: put on a blindfold and pick away!
P.S. Boom Roast of Buffett’s first wife.