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Each March, millions of fans attempt the nearly impossible: filling out a perfect NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket. Below we explore the astronomical odds of a perfect bracket for March Madness (theoretical and with expert insight), highlight historical near-misses, and share notable strategies, trends, and expert tips to improve your bracket predictions.
Theoretical Odds:
The sheer number of possible outcomes makes a perfect bracket exceedingly unlikely. If every game were a 50/50 coin flip, the chance of predicting all 63 games correctly is about 1 in 9.2 quintillion (9,223,372,036,854,775,808). For context, that’s 9.2 billion billions – often illustrated as picking one correct second out of 297 billion years. To put it into further context, the odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 292 million, and the odds of doing that twice in a row is 1 to 85 quadrillion: still 100 times more likely than picking a perfect March Madness bracket! In other words, random guessing won’t cut it.
Expert-Adjusted Odds:
Using basketball knowledge and statistics improves the odds by quite a lot, but they remain astronomically low. The NCAA estimates that a knowledgeable fan’s chance at perfection is on the order of 1 in 120 billion. That’s close to the odds of getting dealt a Royal Flush in Texas Hold’em three times in a row! One mathematician noted that historically people get about 70% of their picks right, which would make the perfect bracket odds roughly 1 in 5.7 billion; even boosting accuracy to 71% only improves it to about 1 in 2.3 billion. Even the best predictive models still imply billions-to-one odds. It’s no surprise, then, that no verified perfect bracket has ever been recorded despite the tens of millions of brackets filled out each year.
Billion-Dollar Prize:
Back in 2014 billionaire Warren Buffet launched a nationwide search for the perfect March Madness bracket, with a prize of $1 billion on offer to anyone who completed it. Nobody did, and since then Mr Buffet has limited the contest – now with a $1 million a year for life top prize for picking the entire first round – to employees at his own company. Nobody to date has won that prize, although employees have picked up $100,000 for being the best performer in a given year.
While nobody has achieved a perfect bracket, a few individuals have come impressively close – stringing together deep runs of correct picks:
A neuropsychologist from Ohio set the all-time record by predicting the first 49 games of the tournament correctly. His bracket stayed perfect through the Sweet 16 (the first two rounds plus regional semifinals) – the first time a verified bracket had remained perfect that long. Nigl’s run finally ended in the 50th game when Purdue edged out Tennessee. A fun twist: Nigl almost didn’t even fill out his bracket because he was feeling under the weather, highlighting how a record run can hinge on simply deciding to play.
Prior to Nigl, the best documented start was a Yahoo Sports user who nailed 39 games in a row to open the 2017 tournament. This streak carried through the Round of 64 and well into the Round of 32 before, coincidentally, Purdue busted this bracket as well (defeating Iowa State in game 40). This player remained anonymous, using only the pseudynom ‘Cornballer’, and most probably did not win a prize for his/her efforts since Yahoo gave prizes for the highest overall score and not the best consecutive streak.
In 2014, Brad Binder, a 23-year-old from Illinois, gained attention for his exceptional performance in predicting NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament outcomes. He correctly predicted the first 36 games of the tournament, achieving a perfect bracket through the Round of 64 and into the Round of 32. His streak ended when 11th-seeded Dayton defeated 3rd-seeded Syracuse, marking his first incorrect prediction.
Away from the consecutive streaks, two anonymous players did managed to pick 54 out of 63 games correctly, which is the all time record. We don’t have any personal info on the two players, other than their usernames of bradmmsmith744 (2015) and KELSEY 2017 (2017).
These examples underscore just how extraordinary a long perfect streak is. Even Nigl’s 49-0 start had odds estimated at 1 in 516 trillion, and it will likely stand as the record for a long time.
Even top-ranked teams aren’t safe from stunning upsets, and these “bracket busters” are a big reason perfect brackets evaporate every year. In 2018, 16-seed UMBC made history as the first No. 16 to ever beat a No. 1 seed (Virginia) in the men’s tournament, an upset so extraordinary it sent virtually all remaining brackets into the trash. Incredibly, it wasn’t a one-off – 2023 saw it happen again when 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson toppled 1-seed Purdue.
Lesser-seeded teams regularly pull off surprises. A No. 15 seed has won a first-round game in each of the last three tournaments, a first in NCAA history. The much-discussed No. 12 over No. 5 upset happens almost every year – 55 times in the past 40 years – making the 12-seed a popular upset pick. In fact, 11-seeds and 10-seeds have nearly as many first-round upsets, with 61 and 60 wins respectively in that span. We’ve even seen multiple 11-seeds crash the Final Four over the years. And of course, some years defy all seeding logic: for example, 2023’s Final Four featured zero 1, 2 or 3 seeds – an unprecedented scenario that wrecked even the most careful brackets.
The takeaway is that March Madness earns its nickname – big surprises are commonplace. High seeds (favorites) do win most games, but predicting exactly which underdogs will prevail (and how far Cinderella teams will go) is extremely challenging, adding to the perfect bracket impossibility. Even the all-mighty AI has been unable to meet this challenge, although perhaps that’s for the best, because when computer models are picking perfect brackets we can say that humanity is really in trouble!
While there’s no foolproof method to guarantee a winning bracket (let alone a perfect one), expert “bracketologists” and statisticians have some advice on how to maximize your chances with these 4 smart tips:
Ross has been writing about sports for over a decade, spcecializing in the NFL, soccer and boxing. His written work has appeared on a number of online publications over that time.