The Billion-Dollar Brackets of March Madness

 
“One in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That’s over nine quintillion, for those of you who gave up after the fourth comma. Those are the odds of a coin-flipping novice filling out a perfect March Madness bracket, calculated by realizing the two possible outcomes for every game in every round, expressed 2^63. The astronomical odds dwarf the likelihood of death by a vending machine falling on you (roughly 1 in 127 million) or winning Powerball (1 in 292 million). In fact, with the CDC stating the odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 500,000 in any given year, you’re more likely to be zapped 18 trillion times before predicting the outcome of every match in the famed college basketball tournament, which explains why nobody ever has since the tradition was born back in 1977 within the walls of a Staten Island bar called Jody’s Club Forest. ...”

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