It's that time of year again, when free-to-play March Madness bracket challenges proliferate, and later in May, poker players live and online will be keeping an eye on TV screens as the NCAA basketball playoffs unfold. Some bracket challenges offer prizes based on best overall performances, while others, more hype-driven, dangle huge theoretical prizes for that picker's holy grail, a perfect NCAA bracket.
Crypto concern StormX, which features popular pro Maria Ho as a brand ambassador, will be offering one such free-to-play challenge. Full details won't be released for several more days, but StormX is dangling $1 million worth of its STMX crypto currency and "many other prizes", with that main prize going to any entrant who might pick all of the final 63 games correctly.
The odds, should you wonder, are truly astronomical, and there's never been any reported instance of any entity ever having to pay out on a "perfect bracket" giveaway. The whole concept received quite a bit of notoriety about a decade when billionaire Warren Buffett took such a contest public after having previously offered it to his Berkshire Hathaway employees, and many other companies have offered their own versions of it ever since.
By astronomical, we mean literally so. According to a National Public Radio feature, if you made each of the 63 picks at random by flipping a coin, your odds against compiling a perfect bracket woud be a measly 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 to one, or one in more than 9.2 quintillion. However, if one assumes reasonable skill in being able to pick favorites and winners in all the games, it's estimated the chances can be reduced all the way down to an estimated 1 in 120 billion.
