Want to win $1,000,000,000 (yes, that’s one billion dollars)? by Ann Drobnis.
The offer is one billion dollars for picking the winners of every game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in the Spring of 2014.
Unfortunately, none of the news stories I saw had links back to any authentic information from Quicken Loans and Berkshire Hathaway about the offer.
After some searching I found: Win a Billion Bucks with the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge by Clayton Closson, on January 21, 2014 on the Quicken Loans blog. (As far as I can tell it is an authentic post on the QL website.)
From that post:
You could be America’s next billionaire if you’re the grand prize winner of the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. You read that right: one billion. Not one million. Not one hundred million. Not five hundred million. One billion U.S. dollars.
All you have to do is pick a perfect tournament bracket for the upcoming 2014 tournament. That’s it. Guess all the winners of all the games correctly, and Quicken Loans, along with Berkshire Hathaway, will make you a billionaire. The official press release is below. The contest starts March 3, 2014, so we’ll soon have all the info on how and when to enter your perfect bracket.
Good luck, my friends. This is your chance to play in perhaps the biggest sweepstakes in U.S. history. It’s your chance for a billion.
Oh, and by the way, the 20 closest imperfect brackets will win a cool hundred grand to put toward their home (or new home). Plus, in conjunction with the sweepstakes, Quicken Loans will donate $1 million to Detroit and Cleveland nonprofits to help with education of inner city youth.
So, to recap: If you’re perfect, you’ll win a billion. If you’re not perfect, you could win $100,000. The entry period begins Monday, March 3, 2014 and runs until Wednesday, March 19, 2014. Stay tuned on how to enter.
Contest updates at: Facebook.com/QuickenLoans.
The odds against winning are absurd but this has all the markings of a big data project. Historical data, current data on the teams and players, models, prior outcomes to test your models, etc.
I wonder if Watson likes basketball?
[…] while I was thinking about yesterday’s post: Want to win $1,000,000,000 (yes, that’s one billion dollars)?, it occurred to me that the common view of this wager is from a potential […]
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