MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Several companies are offering multi-million dollar rewards to anyone who can pick a perfect bracket in the NCAA Tournament. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? You can enter for free, and the chances must be better than the lottery, right?

Ask yourself…what do you think the odds are? Maybe one in a million. Perhaps one in 50 million.

Or maybe you put a little more effort into it and do a few basic calculations. You figure that in the first round of 32 games, the probability of having a perfect prediction is one in four billion.

So if you’re prone to extrapolate you might think that, for the total 63 games in the championship, the overall chance would be something like one in eight billion, right? Logically speaking there are twice as many games, so half the probability.

I was wondering myself, so I actually ran the numbers. The chance of predicting a perfect bracket for March Madness is one in 9.22 quintillion. That’s one in nine billion billions. In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning, being hit by a meteor, and winning the Mega Millions lottery.

But wait – I know my college basketball

“But wait,” you say. “I’ve been following college basketball and I know which teams have a better chance of winning. No way Arkansas-Pine Bluff has any chance of beating Duke.”

Fair enough. In the above example, I used a random-result probability model (a 50/50 chance for every game). So I also created an informed-result probability model.

In this model, I assumed that the higher-ranked team had a two-thirds chance of winning in the first two rounds (after that, it’s still anybody’s game). The chance now is one in 9.29 trillion. Much improved, but still amazingly long odds. Read more…