Sweet sixteen probabilities

Kevin Day, March 23rd, 2008

Thanks to my fiancée, Kristen, for proposing this interesting question: What is the probability that someone has a perfect bracket just through the first two rounds this year?

First, as a baseline, the odds of there being no upsets in the first two rounds of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament are one in 13.2 million. This was calculated with the same winning model as used in my last post.

The odds of the first two rounds occuring like it has so far in the 2008 tournament are one in 376 billion.

Like I showed the other day, that doesn’t mean that the odds are 1 in 376 billion that someone would have correctly predicted the first two rounds. Without doing all of the simulations, I would guess that the odds would increase by about 10,000 because that’s how much they improved last time from the random model to the smarter model.

That means the probability of a perfect bracket through the two rounds so far this year are about one in 37.6 million.

[Edited to give Kristen proper credit for the question]

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