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Comment by dreeves | Hacker News Reader

From http://messymatters.com/the-perfect-bracket/ :

"accounting for team strength, the chance that each of the 63 tournament games is won by the favored team is a mere 1 in 70 billion".

Which implies an expected payout (a billion dollars times the 1 in 70B chance) of 1.4 cents.

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In other words, you could recreate Buffett's $1 billion offer by placing a 1.4 cent bet on the first game, and rolling your winnings on to each successive game. What's more, you're free to stop at any point and take some or all of your winnings home. (Which you would have to do anyway; you'll never be able to place the multi-million dollar bets near the end.)

Hopefully this will put paid to all the crazy comments about match fixing... Buffett is 'giving' you 1.4 cents, and that's inspiring people to talk about organising a massive match fixing conspiracy? Get real!

Don't forget the tax.

He's giving you 1.4 cents if the games are random. If they aren't random, like with match fixing, then he's giving you $1 billion. That leaves plenty of money to bribe the relevant refs and players.

You missed my point. Buffett's offer is irrelevant to the subject of match fixing. If he had never made this $1 billion promotion, you could still achieve the same payout by placing a bet for just over a cent.

All this talk of match fixing is just noise; sure, it could be an interesting topic of discussion, but it is completely unrelated to Buffett's offer.

Unless you really think people out there weren't going to try and fix matches, but suddenly they change their mind now they've been given a free 1.4 cent bet.

Sorry, I did miss that. It is an excellent point.

There is a slight difference, in that were you to get a couple of games away from winning the $1b there would be a huge incentive for fixing at least one match to kill your chance right at the end. Not that Buffett would do that, but if it did get to that point then he's certainly in a different position to "all I'm doing is offering the 1.4 cent first bet".

so if you come up with the best strategy and figure a way to submit an 70 billion entries for 1c each around that optimal guess, you could net 2.8 million

Except they're limiting entries to the first 10 million.

...assuming a completely random outcome.

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