In games like Powerball® and Mega Millions®, the long odds of winning the jackpot are often in focus. You don’t get the gigantic top prizes involved without long odds.
But right now, another contest is underway involving even longer odds. It’s kind of a badge of honor to be among those getting the picks wrong because it’s nearly impossible to get them all right.
I’m talking about having a perfect bracket in the men’s or women’s college basketball tournaments. According to the statisticians, if you just take a guess at the outcome of the tournament games, you have odds of about 1 in 9.2 quintillion of picking all 63 games correctly.
A quintillion is one billion billions. It looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 followed by 18 zeros).
Apparently, if you know something about basketball, you can lower your odds of getting a perfect bracket down to about 1 in 120.2 billion.
By comparison, the odds of winning the jackpot in Powerball are about 1 in 292.2 million. In Mega Millions, the odds of winning the jackpot are about 1 in 302.6 million.
So, whether you’re tracking your bracket or buying a ticket for that next drawing, just remember to have fun with it. The long odds involved definitely give us all something to talk about!
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