Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmo20002
A couple articles I saw said there's about 9 quintillion ways to fill out a bracket, but if you have "some expertise" you could get it down to around 1 in 128 billion. They didn't define "some expertise," but I'd assume that at least means not picking 16s or 15s (unless vs Mizzou  ).
For comparison, the odds of picking the winning number in the MegaMillions lottery is 1:259 million and Powerball is 1:175 million. |
Yeah, I've tried to quantify the "some expertise" thing too. I think its reasonable to start with assuming the 15's and 16's always lose, and you are just punting the years when they don't. As I said earlier, that is 1 in 36 quadrillion. (If we put the 15's into play, then the odds become silly at that point).
Of those brackets, most of them are probably unreasonable, you'll have a lot of them where all the 14's win for example. Probably well over half, but what percentage of those brackets should we dismiss as "stupid" brackets? If we want to be really, really aggressive we could say that only 1 out of every 10,000 of those possible 36 quadrillion brackets are reasonable. I think thats going too far, but lets throw away 9,999 out of every 10,000 brackets as "stupid" brackets.
We're left with 3.6 trillion possible brackets. We have about 7 billion people on the planet, and about 1/3 of them have internet access. (so about 2 1/3 billion) If every single person on the planet who had the capability of filling out an ESPN bracket did so, after about 771 years (skipping years where a 15 or 16 wins), we'd have only a 50/50 chance of having someone finally fill out a perfect bracket.