If you pick EVERY SINGLE WINNER correctly, Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans will award you $1 billion! Provided, of course, you file your picks before the tournament begins.
There is no link in the story below to file your bracket, but I'm sure that when the time comes, you will find how to file it.
Buffett Will Give You $1 Billion for Perfect NCAA Bracket
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) is backing a $1 billion prize offered by Quicken Loans Inc. if a contestant predicts the winner of each game in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball tournament.
The prize would be paid in 40 annual installments of $25 million and split among multiple winners if there is more than one perfect entrant, the Detroit-based lender said today in a statement. The winner has the option of a single payment of $500 million.
"We’ve seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth?” Quicken Loans Chief Marketing Officer Jay Farner said in the statement. “We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat.”
Buffett suggested the $1 billion contest to Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert when the Berkshire chairman was in Detroit late last year for an economic-development event with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, Farner said in an interview.
The odds of picking every winner correctly in a 64-team bracket are less than 1 in 9 quintillion, according to Jeff Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University in Chicago. Even with some basketball knowledge, that only improves to about 1 in 128 billion, he said.
The odds of Buffett having to pay out reach about 1 in 10,000 in the Quicken Loans contest if all 10 million entrants have basketball knowledge, Bergen said.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament, known as “March Madness,” is among the most-watched sporting events in the U.S. The championship game last year attracted 23.4 million viewers, CBS Corp. said in April after the University of Louisville defeated the University of Michigan. CBS and Time Warner Inc.’s Turner Broadcasting agreed in 2010 to a $10.8 billion, 14-year contract for broadcast, Internet and wireless rights to the tournament.
“Millions of people play brackets every March, so why not take a shot at becoming $1 billion richer for doing so,” the billionaire Berkshire CEO said in the statement. “While there is no simple path to success, it sure doesn’t get much easier than filling out a bracket online.”
Of the 8.15 million brackets submitted to ESPN last year, none were perfect after the field was narrowed to 32 teams. The best record, shared by 5 brackets, was 30 and 2.
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