Your 2014 NCAA Bracket May Be Worth $1Billion
21 Jan, 2014
Talk about March madness.
Quicken Loans, owned by Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, will award a $1 billion prize to anyone who fills out a perfect 2014 NCAA tournament bracket.
It’s the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, insured by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
“We’ve seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth?” Quicken Loans president Jay Farner said in a press release issued by the company. “We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat.”
How impressive? According to the short-form official rules, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 4,294,967,296.
According to those short-form rules published on the Quicken Loans Facebook page, the contest is open to legal residents of the U.S. 21 years and older. No purchase is necessary. One entry per household. The grand prize will be payable in annual payments of $25 million for 40 years or as a one-time payment of $500 million. There also will be 20 first-place prizes of $100,000 each for the best brackets that are not perfect to use toward buying, refinancing or remodeling a home.
In conjunction with the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, Quicken Loans also will donate $1 million to inner-city Cleveland and Detroit non-profit organizations dedicated to improving the education of young Cleveland and Detroit residents.
Further details and official rules will be available on the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge website when it is activated for registration on March 3. Registration begins on March 3 at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time. Selection Sunday is March 16.
According to the ESPN website, John Diver, director of product development for ESPN Fantasy, said not a single bracket among the almost 30 million entries submitted to ESPN’s Tournament Challenge over the past 16 years has been perfect.
“I don’t want to say it’s impossible,” Diver said, “but it’s basically impossible.”
Cleveland.com
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