$12 Billion To Be Wagered On NCAA Tournament Games
(AP) – Apparently, the dreaded sequester will not affect college basketball wagering.
Las Vegas-based sports-betting guru RJ Bell of Pregame.com said 100 million people around the world are expected to put $12 billion on the line beginning with Thursday's games — "more action combined than the Super Bowl!" according to his release.
But those aren't the really staggering numbers.
It's 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 — or if you insist on rounding off, 9.2 quintillion.
If we read Bell's release correctly — no sure bet, so we called — those are the odds that even one of those 100 million brackets would be perfect by tourney's end.
"That's ONE MILLION times bigger than 9 TRILLION!" Bell's release added helpfully.
Or, put another way: "If all the people on Earth filled out one bracket per second, it would take over 43 years to fill out every possible bracket."
And another: "If all possible brackets were stacked on top of each other (on standard paper), the pile would reach from the moon and back over 1.1 million times."
Of course, that's just for the 64-team bracket.
"If expanded to consider 68 teams," Bell added, "multiple the figures by 4."
Somebody get the man another espresso.
