“You basically have no chance,” he said.
Even if you’re relatively well informed about college basketball, your odds are pretty long — about one in 128 billion. That means that every person on the planet could spend the next three weeks educating themselves about the NCAA and fill out a bracket, and there would be only about a 5 percent chance that someone would get it right.
The math behind Bergen’s calculations is pretty basic. In a tournament like the NCAA, each game has exactly two outcomes, and the number of possible outcomes increases exponentially with each game that’s played. So a two-team tournament would only have two outcomes, a three-team tournament would have four, a four-team tournament would have eight and a 64-team tournament would have 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
In a DePaul news release, Bergen had a lot of fun listing all the things that are more likely than someone getting a perfect bracket: winning the Mega Millions Lottery two times in a row using the same ticket both times, a Chicago baseball team winning the World Series every year for the next 16.
Only one person in recorded history has ever achieved a perfect bracket — a 23-year-old named Brad Binder, who was lucky enough to predict last year’s upsets but not smart enough to have entered any pools beforehand. Here was his response to news of his unprecedented accomplishment:
For the love of the bracket guys, did it for the love of the bracket
— Brad Binder (@Brad_Binder_) March 22, 2014
One of the many sweepstakes Binder missed out on was Warren Buffet’s bracket challenge, which promised a cool $1 billion prize to anyone who could correctly predict the entire tournament. The Berkshire Hathaway founder has not announced whether he’ll hold the same competition this year — maybe Binder’s perfect prediction was a little too close.
But Bergen urged bracket-makers not to get overwhelmed by their unlikely chances: They should do it for the love of math.
“As a math professor, I do enjoy having fun with this. But it is important to remember that although the numbers are astounding and far bigger than ones we come across in daily life, the math involved can be taught at the high-school level,” he said. “Anyone interested in math can understand where all these numbers come from.”