This is my co-worker's bracket. She made her picks this morning. "That guy is hot, I like his tattoo, I use to live in Florida..." This is how she came to the conclusion above. If you can't see, she has Long Island in the Sweet 16, BU in the Elite 8, and Princeton in the finals. Every year people spend hours crunching numbers, looking at every possible detail to pick the perfect bracket. If each game were a true toss-up, that would mean your chance of picking the perfect bracket is one in two to the 63rd power, or one in nine million trillion. Put another way, you are about 60 billion times more likely to win the Powerball. In all likelihood, my co-worker will win the office pool, be $300 richer, and I wallow in defeat. But that is the beauty of March Madness, anybody can win on any given day. May the luckiest man win.
But is each game a true coin flip? Nope. So you're little number crunching was a complete waste of time
ReplyDeleteyou are right that each game is not a toss up but it is never a waste of time to put things in perspective.
ReplyDeleteIs disregarding reality - actual probabilities - really putting things into perspective?
ReplyDeletehttp://mkaz.com/archives/156/the-odds-of-a-perfect-bracket/
ReplyDeleteTake it with a grain of salt but it incorporates more realistic probabilities...I'd still rather bet on something else.
The point I was trying to make is the marginal return on the time you spend making your bracket is small and gets much smaller as time goes on.