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OMAHA, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- Two years ago, billionaire Warren Buffett offered $1 billion for a winning March Madness bracket. This time the reward is $1 million every year, for life. The businessman's Berkshire Hathaway investment house announced the prize Monday, a little more than two weeks before the start of the 68-team college basketball tournament.
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However, unlike the billion dollar contest, this year's is available only to the 361,000 employees of Berkshire and its subsidiaries.
For his workers, this year's game has a much greater chance of producing a winner.
Buffett will definitely give $100,000 to the employee who makes the most correct picks in the bracket through the third round, or Sweet Sixteen.
If one of them gets every pick correct through the Sweet Sixteen, they will receive $1 million per year for the rest of their life.
In 2014, Buffett partnered with Quicken Loans to offer $1 billion to anyone who could pick a perfect bracket. With a chance of between 1-in-4.3 billion and 1-in-9.2 quintilian, not surprisingly, no one did it.
Buffett did not offer a contest for last year's tournament.
This year's game has better odds, although ESPN noted that none of the 48 million brackets in its Tournament Challenge contest last year got the first two rounds entirely correctly. In fact, the network said only one of those entries was able to pick just the first round correctly.
The NCAA Tournament bracket will be unveiled on March 15 and the first two play-in games will begin two days later. The round of 64, when most teams begin play, starts March 19.
