Warren Buffett’s NCAA bracket challenge has a winner.
A West Virginia factory worker won $100,000 for correctly picking the first 29 games of the basketball tournament’s first round, outlasting everyone else who entered the competition for Berkshire Hathaway employees.
He also picked the winners of the 31st and 32nd games correctly. The 30th game, between Marquette and South Carolina, cost him big time. If he had correctly picked South Carolina to win, he would have pocketed $1 million with a perfect first-round bracket.
But at least he didn’t have to split the pot like last year’s two winners.
Berkshire Hathaway didn’t release the employee’s name.
The ultimate prize of Buffett’s competition is $1 million a year for life. To win that, you have to pick the winners of all 32 first-round games, plus the 16 games in the second round.
Buffett has held the competition since 2014. That year he offered $1 billion to anyone who could correctly pick the winners of all 63 games in the main tournament — a perfect bracket. No one won.
The initial competition was open to the public and was held in partnership with Quicken Loans and Yahoo. Since then, Buffett has offered the competition on his own to employees.
This year’s competition had more than 96,000 entrants — more than a quarter of Berkshire’s 367,000 employees.
