If you go into any sports book in Reno this week you will find folks filling out college basketball brackets. For that matter you'll also find people filling out brackets in a lot of offices around town too. And all those brackets are trying to guess the odds for the NCAA tournament that kicks off this week.
"We are excited for the next few weeks. Everyone's got a chance to win. You can put money on either side of every game," said Steve Mikkelson who manages the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa Sports Book.
And seriously, what are the odds of winning the entire thing?
We took that question to Brandon Leach's statistics and probabilities class at Spanish Springs High School today.
"So, let's take a look at this. Let's figure out the number of games and the possibilities and the odds," he told his class as he hung up a giant banner of the matchups.
And so they began crunching numbers on calculators with a lot of chatter about the possibilities.
And it wasn't too long before they came up with the answer.
"The odds are 9.2 quintillion that anyone could ever get all the brackets right," said Maddie Bosco. "I mean it's nearly impossible."
But there is a slim chance. And according to the Steve Mikkelson, that's all it really takes.
“If it could all be done on paper, and there were no upsets or blowouts what fun would that be?"
He's got a point.
The first round of games are here on Channel 2 which means no early newscasts on Thursday or Friday. But we will have a special edition newscast after the final games around 9 p.m. and our regular newscast will be at 11:00 p.m.
