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Out of 15M brackets, none remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet
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
- creade 13y agoIt'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_Sweepstakes#Insurance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Billion_Dollar_Sweepstake...
- curiouscats 13y agoRight, 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.
- FireBeyond 13y agoI doubt it's a fortune. After all, given the astronomical odds, I think you'd be able to argue an insignificant premium was appropriate.
- callmevlad 13y agoSome background: Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion For Perfect March Madness Bracket http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warren-buffett-offers-1-billion-for-perfect-march-madness-bracket/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warr...
- magikbum 13y agoActually down to just 1 at the time of 10 PM EST on Friday
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- selectout 13y agoIt's actually none now. They sent out an email and push notification.
- callmevlad 13y agoLooks like I can no longer edit the title, but you're right. http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-longer-any-perfect-brackets-left-in-the-billion-dollar-bracket-challenge-003853949.html http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-...
- fjw 13y agoLooks like the final perfect bracket (even though it's ineligible for the Billion Dollar Challenge) is about to be busted anyway with VCU on the verge of beating S.F. Austin. edit: March Madness.
- defen 13y agoS.F. Austin had a 4-point play with 3.6 seconds left in the game to tie. Then they won in overtime. That guy is still perfect!
- thrush 13y agoThere 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/en/leaderboard http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/e...
- jw2013 13y agoNow they are all done. Thanks, SF Austin. I got it wrong, too.
- jefft 13y agoNot anymore: SFA 77 VCU 75
- sundance0 13y agoLooks like that bracket called that game correctly. He's still 31/31 according to that link.
- sharkweek 13y agoHad a perfect first day -- then the first game today completely wrecked my bracket - but on the bright side I always enjoy seeing Duke lose
- gammarator 13y agoThere is one on Yahoo that still has a chance to get all of the first round right: https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/2030973 https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbrack...
- dba7dba 13y agoThis stunt actually makes me angry. Not a good PR move imo. "I have enough money that I can risk giving up a billion $. And I may just give it to you if you can beat the odds that's harder than getting hit by lighting multiples times in 1 year." How about offering pot of 100 million to top (aka sweep) 16 instead... But never mind, it's their money...
- poopicus 13y agoI would argue that as a PR move, it's pretty brilliant. It's been brought up countless times since it was announced, and it's been pretty hype up until now. Sure, it was basically a sure bet for Buffet.. But it spawned a community in itself[1] and captured the imagination of many. I'd call that a good move. [1] http://www.takebuffettsbillion.com/ http://www.takebuffettsbillion.com/
- _Robbie 13y agoThis does seem silly. According to the article, the odds of picking the correct bracket are less than 1 in 128 billion, so there is practically zero risk.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dfc 13y ago...drum roll... Accurately assessing financial risk is the reason Buffet has stacked so much paper.
- tim333 13y agoUnless you have a really good crystal ball.
- asdfologist 13y agoDon't all these "odds" assume each game has same odds as a coin flip?
- dfc 13y agoNot a good PR move? Is this because you think it is a bad idea for: * quicken to get a ton of free mentions in the press with one month before income taxes are due? * this otherwise unknown gentleman from the midwest to announce to the world that he has a lot of money?
- jerf 13y agoFrom 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.
- catshirt 13y agoha i don't know- i thought the anti-climax was kind of great. speaks to the math really.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoThere'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.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoNot true - in ESPN leagues, only 1 bracket the past 7 years made it past the first weekend perfect.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoHmm. I'm pretty sure I've seen more than 1 perfect bracket in the last 7 years on Yahoo, but I was certainly wrong about second round. Apparently there's only one documented case ever of a second round perfect bracket.
- wernercd 13y agohttps://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/2030973 https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbrack...
- bluedevil2k 13y agoA 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.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoMath says you'd be willing to sell a 50% stake for $10M. Sad to think that compared to the "billion $" headlines.
- jw2013 13y agoIf 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.
- jmduke 13y agoI'd argue that your chance of winning the bracket (or, at least, a valuation of it) is much higher than that given your ability to predict all of the matches prior. (I don't think this would qualify as gambler's fallacy, though I'm welcome to counterarguments.)
- thejosh 13y agoSo 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?
- maxerickson 13y agoIf you assume knowledge about basketball is useful, billions: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228-chance-of-winning-buffetts-billion/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228... It goes way up from there if you treat it like coin flips.
- Alex_MJ 13y agoFrom 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.
- ed 13y agoWell, duh. At 63 games this has an expected value of $1e-10. https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000000%2F2%5E63 https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000000%2F2%5E63
- testacular 13y agoYou naively assumes that every game is a 50/50 coin-toss, resulting in an estimate that's off by many orders of magnitude. A more realistic model would put the average edge around 58%, and the value of a single bracket at a much greater level: $0.000001.
- naftaliharris 13y agoThat would be the case if each of the games were played between truly equal teams. In fact, many of the games are much easier to predict than 50/50 since one team is better than another. So the expected value is actually higher, (though presumably still quite small, of course!)
- asdfologist 13y agoNo, that's only if you assume every game has the same odds as a coin flip, which is far from true.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cgtyoder 13y agoThere is still one bracket left as of 11:27p EDT. https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/2030973 https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbrack...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yock 13y agoI saw this too. Am I missing something or is the headline here wrong?
- dustinrodrigues 13y agoThis person submitted a Yahoo bracket, but it wasn't part of the billion dollar challenge. But still, 32/32 is nothing to shrug at. The rest of his bracket is pretty reasonable too, except for Oregon in the final four. Oftentimes, people who are correct after the first sets of games are people who don't have a very sound bracket and randomly chose upsets that happened to end up correct.
- ianhawes 13y agoNotice how he's not entered into the Quicken Loans Bracket Pool? They also sent out an email to all the participants stating that nobody was left perfect, so I'm going to guess that he either filled out his bracket post-Round of 64 or was unlucky enough to not actually enter it into the Billion Dollar Challenge.
- PhantomGremlin 13y agoAssuming 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 13y agoWhat? 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.
- Miner49er 13y agoIt's not actually a 1 in a million chance though. It's more like 1 in 9.2 quintillion. I'd argue for many the time it takes to enter is worth more than those odds, not to mention giving up all the personal info to Quicken loans and Yahoo.
- PhantomGremlin 13y agoElsewhere in this discussion someone posted this link [1] which claims that Odds are that Buffett’s bracket isn’t worth your time, however. Having a 1-in-7.4 billion chance of winning a billion dollars is worth the equivalent of 14 cents. That’s before accounting for taxes I understand why you entered. It's for the same reason people play the lottery. People value a large payoff much more highly than a small one, even if the odds are worse for the big payoff. I.e. for many people it's not worth betting $2 for a 1:2 chance of winning $4. That won't be a life changing event. But people are willing to bet $2 for a 1:175,223,510 chance of winning perhaps $100,000,000, even though those odds are much worse. That's how Powerball makes money. BTW I do bet on Powerball once in a while. In my case I figured it wasn't worth betting $0.14 (because I knew it would take more than that of my time) to win $1,000,000,000. [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228-chance-of-winning-buffetts-billion/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228...
- 6thSigma 13y agoBuffet 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.
- runevault 13y agoUpsets 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 13y agoWhat am I missing...? The top bracket is still perfect, currently 30/30 and their pick is leading in the other two games
- dperfect 13y agoFrom 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.
- jpeg_hero 13y agoThis shows you the power of statistics
- dennisz 13y agoThere's still one perfect bracket after BOTH days (though not in the Buffet challenge): http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2001973-this-is-the-only-perfect-ncaa-tournament-bracket-left?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=programming-national http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2001973-this-is-the-only-...
- cheeyoonlee 13y agoWe have a better chance winning the Mega Millions jackpot
- joeblau 13y agoLOL, 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.
- waylandsmithers 13y agoThey 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.