TruBluMich

January 21st, 2014 at 7:10 PM ^

It's one entry per household. There goes the whole bot idea. Not unless anyone here knows how I can hijack a few trillion IP addresses to submit a bracket.

Joined: 08/03/2011

MGoPoints: 21561

M-Dog

January 21st, 2014 at 8:05 PM ^

This is genius.  It even made the national news broadcasts.  You promise a billion dollars for something that will never happen and you get free blanket-coverage publicity nationwide.

So I, M-Dog of MGoBlog, will pledge a trillion dollars to whomever picks a perfect NCAA bracket and a perfect NIT bracket.  

Alert the media.

Joined: 07/06/2008

MGoPoints: 257385

Section 1

January 21st, 2014 at 8:44 PM ^

... has Michigan State losing to Weber State in the first round.  Just sayin'.  You might want to keep that in mind.

Joined: 06/29/2009

MGoPoints: 16535

treetown

January 22nd, 2014 at 12:36 AM ^

Like the lotto, this sort of proposition doesn't pay off at the actual odds.

Consider - a tourney of two teams takes 1 game to decide the champion. 4 teams, takes 3 games (two semis and one final). Extending that reasoning, a 8 teams tourney takes 7 games. A 64 team field will take 63 games. If one were just to pick the winner at random (that is giving each team equal chance to win each game regardless of opponent, location, round) that means there is 1 in 2 raised to the power equal to the number of games. So the odds in the two team tourney is 1 in 2, in a 4 team tourney, 1 in 8 (2 to the 3rd power), and in the 64 game tourney, 1 in 2 to the 63rd power or a 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,780,000.

Joined: 11/10/2010

MGoPoints: 6339

mikoyan

January 22nd, 2014 at 9:03 AM ^

The odds go down to 1 something X 10^13 if you start taking into account that no 16 team has lost to a 1 team and the 2 team wins 95% of the time, etc.  The only real 50/50 shot is the 8-9 games.  But when I calculated that, I assumed 50/50 in the rest of the tournament and I know that's not right, so it's probably somewhere in the order of 10^12 or so.  That's still a longshot though.

Joined: 09/06/2010

MGoPoints: 2784

Durham Blue

January 22nd, 2014 at 8:43 AM ^

is if they subtracted like $50 million from the $1 billion for every loss.  Best bracket wins.  So you could still end up with like $600 million with eight losses.  Now THAT would be something to talk about.

Joined: 10/09/2008

MGoPoints: 30004

Princetonwolverine

January 22nd, 2014 at 8:58 AM ^

They should force Bill Gates to become your slave if you also get all of the scores right.

Joined: 10/10/2010

MGoPoints: 14174