March madness how many combinations

Last year I got to interview Randall Munroe — a guy who regularly confronts this kind of problem — and he talked about it better than anyone I can think of:.

One thing that bothers me is large numbers presented without context. But I have only a vague idea of what one ton of concrete looks like. I have no idea what to think of a million tons. Is that a lot? That being said, here is a series of sentences about the number 9. We should start small, then work our way up. There are two possible ways to fill in that part of the bracket. Our source code is available on GitHub. Write to Chris Wilson at chris.

Will Any of Them Be Perfect? By Chris Wilson. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? We're sports fans, it's what we do best. MORE: Why it's nearly impossible to have perfect bracket. He called in sick to work and planned to stay in bed to recuperate, but before he could take a nap, Nigl decided to fill out a bracket so he could participate in the tournament group with his friends.

That bracket turned out to be the best one ever recorded. His picks started winning on Thursday morning and kept it up. He was perfect through the first round, then the second. Nigl became the first person to have a verified bracket that correctly predicted every game through the Sweet He picked the first 49 games correctly, crushing the old recorded record of Tens of millions of brackets are filled out every year, so it's possible someone has produced a better bracket on paper or before websites kept an official record.

According to its website, the NCAA has "closely tracked about million online brackets per year at a half dozen major games since using public leaderboards in combination with direct reporting and information gathering with those games.

The act of correctly predicting the first 49 games of the Tournament is incredible, nonetheless. If every game is viewed as a probability, the odds of correctly picking 49 straight games, as Nigl did, are one in trillion.

Others have tried to refine the rough estimate. Georgia Tech professor Joel Sokol that's him above has worked for years on a statistical model to predict college basketball games, and he says that the best models we have today are only right three quarters of the time, at best. Which is partly what makes people think that about a quarter of tournament games are upsets. Sokol said that using a model that predicts regular-season games correctly 75 percent of the time would give you odds of getting a perfect bracket anywhere between 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 40 billion.

Much, much better than 1 in 9. So high that Sokol doesn't believe it will ever happen. About that, last year, of the millions of brackets entered into our Bracket Challenge Game, Even with So close. Speaking of Bracket Challenge Game users, we can use that data to get another estimate on the odds of a perfect bracket. We have the pick history for millions of players over the past five years. For example, a 5 vs. Not bad.