Betting on March Madness

Reported March 2006

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- The NCAA tournament is the most coveted title in college basketball. For the fans, however, the office pool is a sport of its own. But can math help you improve your picks?

With 64 games determining who's the winner of the big dance you're hoping for the big prize in your office pool. But mathematician Mike Breen, from the American Mathematical Society in Providence, R.I., says the odds of a guaranteed win are not in your court.

The only sure-fire method is to pick every possible outcome using a kind of math called combinatorics. Since there are 64 games and two possible outcomes -- a win or a loss -- that number is enormous. According to Breen it is 18 quintillion, 446 quadrillion.

"So if every person on Earth could fill out a bracket every second, then it would take them roughly one century to fill out all possibilities," Breen tells Ivanhoe.

Mathematicians say if a dollar bill represented each of the possible outcomes, you could lay them end-to-end and they would make two round trips between earth and the big dipper. While the odds seem out of this world, there is a way to score some points. "One thing is: The number one seeds seem to make it to the Final Four," Breen says. It's not a slam-dunk, but that advice may get you closer to the jackpot.

One other factoid, if you wanted to hit your home with a bean bag from space, you'd have a better chance of hitting your roof then you would of correctly picking all the brackets in the tournament randomly.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Michael Breen, Mathematician
American Mathematical Society
201 Charles Street
Providence, RI 02904-2294 USA
Telephone: 800 321-4AMS (4267)

March Madness is in the air! If you're hoping for the big prize in your office pool, you have to be lucky!

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