What's often quoted in Warren Buffet's Billion dollar NCAA contest are the odds of randomly picking the perfect bracket of teams, but I have to think that Buffet's insurance actuaries actually calculated the odds of randomly selecting the right bracket with a millions of random guesses around a locus of likely guesses informed by analysis like the posted page (and from other stats analysis professionals.. vegas oddsmakers for example...). Otherwise the risk of taking that bet is actually much higher than a fully random pick, yes?<p>Edit: As it turns out, Warren Buffet, as usual, seems to have done his homework and even adds the interesting angle of "buying out" a possible winner partway through the contest:<p><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/03/billion_dollar_bracket_challenge_why_it_s_a_bad_idea_to_enter_warren_buffett.2.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/03/bill...</a>
Silver's round-by-round projection percentages are included in the HTML source. If you like building rule-specific points projections, here's the data, extracted:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/ajstiles/06e2ac52927d3f292255" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/ajstiles/06e2ac52927d3f292255</a>
I find the discussion of their model much more interesting than the results:
<a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nate-silvers-ncaa-basketball-predictions/" rel="nofollow">http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nate-silvers-ncaa-basket...</a>
A #16 seed has never beaten a #1 seed in the history of the tournament, yet the percentages of moving on for #1 seeds against #16 seeds vary from 96%-99%.<p>I wonder if there would be any of this variance (4 percentage points from 100%) if computers, without human input, were used to place the likelihood of moving on.
Is this the first year Nate and his team have modeled the NCAA Tournament? I'd be curious to know if they applied a similar statistical approach last year and, if so, how that model faired against the actual tournament results.
Florida has a higher percentage of winning every round than Louisville, but Louisville has a higher overall chance of winning the tourney.<p>What am I missing?