AUSTIN, Texas — March Madness is in full swing, and millions of brackets have already been busted.
Friday night, the Mega Millions jackpot will give Americans a chance to win almost a billion dollars, though much less after taxes.
With these two events converging, it begs the question: What is more likely to happen – getting a perfect bracket or winning the jackpot?
Twice a week, people across the country pay $2 for a Mega Millions ticket. The jackpot starts at $20 million, and the largest amount that's ever been won is $1.602 billion, won in August 2023 by a player in Florida.
The largest jackpot that's ever been won in a lottery, however, was a Powerball ticket worth $2.04 billion that was won in California in November 2022.
The odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot
The odds of winning are extremely slim, but each year, around seven people on average win the jackpot. 2023 saw 10 people win – the highest number of winners in a single year since 2013, when 11 people won..
The chances of winning are about 1 in 302,575,350. For context, the U.S. has a population of about 332 million and about 72.5 million people in the U.S. are under the age of 18. In other words, your odds of winning the jackpot are infinitesimally smaller than being elected president. It's also far more likely that you would be struck by lightning or attacked by a shark.
The odds of having a perfect March Madness bracket
The odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot are astonishingly small, but at least there appears to be a chance, no matter how microscopic, that it could happen. The chances of achieving a perfect bracket are quite literally exponentially smaller than that.
The odds of picking a perfect bracket, according to the NCAA, are around 1 in 9.2 quintillion. In numerical value, that's 1 in 9,200,000,000,000,000,000.
More specifically, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are really around 1 in 9,223,372,036,845,775,808.
That's not too daunting, right?
Those odds are practically unquantifiable. For context, there are around 8.1 billion people on Earth and 9.2 quintillion is about 1,135,802,469 times larger than that.
Quite literally, the odds of completing a perfect March Madness bracket are 1 in more than 1 billion times the number of people on Earth.
As far as anyone is aware, a perfect bracket has, unsurprisingly, never happened before. Warren Buffet has famously offered a $1 billion prize for anyone who is able to pick a perfect bracket.
But if you're a college basketball fan, don't worry! The good news for people who are knowledgeable about the sport is that they actually have a much more "realistic" chance of guessing each winning team.
Those odds shrink substantially, to a meager 1 in 120.2 billion. That's only 15 times larger than Earth's population.
