You Could Win $1 Billion of Warren Buffet's Money – But Consider Your Odds Before You Get Too Excited

Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Warren Buffett has a pretty sweet NCAA bracket promotion with Quicken Loans: Correctly guess all the winners of this year's college basketball tournament and win a billion dollars.

But your odds of winning are astronomical.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett wears Creighton stickers prior to an NCAA college basketball game in Omaha, Neb., Saturday, March 8, 2014. (AP)

The promotion, appropriately called the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, will be open to the first 15 million people to set up an account through Yahoo!

Sounds like a pretty simple way to win a cool billion, right?

Not exactly.

According to the Washington Post, the odds of entering a perfect bracket in a contest sponsored by a company owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company are approximately 9.2 quintillion-to-1.

Sure, there’s a chance of winning, but it’s not much.

Your odds of winning improve to “one in 128 billion if you know something about college basketball,” Jeffrey Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University, told USA Today.

Buffett, a noted sports enthusiast, told ESPN he was so excited for the bracket challenge that he wrote the policy himself.

“I just sat right in that chair,” he said in his office, “and I did the calculations. Took me about 10 or 15 minutes. I hope I did it right.”

And there’s no reason to doubt Buffett wrote it himself. There’s also no reason to doubt he’s well aware of the fact that out of more than 30 million entries, no one has entered a perfect bracket in the 16 years ESPN has been doing the challenge.

It’s worth pointing out that the contest isn’t a total waste of time. Indeed, Quicken will award $100,000 to each of the 20 contestants with the most accurate brackets. So at least there's that.

And, again, there is a chance someone wins the big bucks from Buffett, a possibility he has already considered.

“I think they should put us on a split-screen TV,” Buffett said, referring to himself and hopeful bracket challenge contestants. “And on every shot, every free throw, they’d show us, and one of us won’t be happy."

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