We’ve all been enjoying the tournament, especially those of us who went to Wisconsin and gleefully saw our brackets busted in the upset of a lifetime.
But we can probably all agree that a factory worker in West Virginia is having the best week of anyone. His name hasn’t been released but we know that he’s one of 367,000 employees who works for Warren Buffett’s multination conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. Of this pool of workers, roughly 96,000 entered Buffett’s annual bracket challenge, a competition the billionaire company chair has offered since 2014.
The challenge offers a series of lucrative, tiered prizes based on the accuracy of each employees’ NCAA tournament bracket predictions. The top prize is actually a million dollars a year for life, which comes via the near-impossible seeming feat of picking the winners of all 32 first-round games, plus the 16 games in the second round.
Well, in this case – a factory worker selected the first 29 games correctly and wound up netting $100,000 for outlasting everyone else. CNN reports that he also picked the winners of the 31st and 32nd games correctly, but the 30th game – Marquette v. South Carolina – was a big miss: Reportedly, if he had correctly picked South Carolina to win, he would have walked away with a perfect first-round bracket and a million bucks.
ESPN says the odds of getting all 32 first-round games correct this season was 1 in 3,426, which is really not too bad and makes it all the more lucky for this employee that he didn’t wind up splitting his loot with Carol from HR. But getting the $1 million per year package that comes with picking the first two rounds correctly is a bit tougher: in fact, the odds go to 1 in 1,943,573.
