What are the odds?

Countless websites offer enormous grand prizes for anyone able to fill out a perfect bracket. The reasoning behind such large, attention grabbing sums of money is because the odds are an astronomical 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

Written out, that is 9 Quintillion 223 Quadrillion 372 Trillion 36 Billion 854 Million 775 Thousand 808. And this does not include the play in games.

Compare the odds
To take this in comparison, the odds of hitting the Mega Millions Jackpot are "only" 1 in 258,890,850(258 million) and the odds of hitting the Power Ball are slightly lower at 175,223,510. Heck, the odds of getting struck by lightning in any given year are only 1 in 700,000. Needless to say there has yet to be a recordable perfect bracket.

How are these odds calculated?

Although that large quintillion number looks and sounds amusing, that number represents what are called the "True Odds". This assumes that every game of the tournament is a completely random choice. To calculate that number you would take the total number of possible winners per game which is 2 and multiply it by itself 63 times(the total number of games played). Obviously the tournament picks are not going to be completely random and you can slowly increase those odds by using your basketball knowledge and using past tournament results such as the #1 seeds never being beaten. But experts still say that even with the basketball knowledge you are still about 130 Billion to 1 to picking that perfect bracket. To sum it up, go ahead an get one of our Printable Brackets but don't be too disappointed if you have to start crossing of a losing pick or two.