http://www.slate.com/articles/sports...n_buffett.html
Yahoo and Quicken note in the fine print of their rules page: “odds of winning the Grand Prize are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808.” That’s 1 in 9 quintillion and change.
Jeff Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University, derived a more realistic calculation that takes basketball knowledge into account. If you know the sport pretty well, he concludes, your chances of picking perfectly are more like 1 in 128 billion.
Still not so hot. As Bergen explained, that would mean you’d need to fill out about 90 billion brackets before you even had a 50-50 chance to win.
Buffett and Quicken have capped the number of entries at 15 million, so the odds that there’s a winner stay very, very small. If you use Bergen’s calculation, generously assuming the contest fills up with 15 million basketball experts, then Buffett and Quicken would have to pay the billion only 0.012 percent of the time. That means there’s about a 1 in 8,500 chance that anyone wins, period.