Come March of every year since 1939 there has been a college basketball tournament held known as March Madness. This name comes from the chaos that ensues when 64 of the country’s best basketball programs in America of that year all collide head to head in a tournament to decide the best team.

The tournament starts out with play in rounds to decide who gets to be in the tournament between the lower-seeded teams and teams on the cusp of making the tournament. Once those games have concluded and the number of schools has been whittled down to 64 the real entertainment begins. The 64 remaining teams are divided into four separate divisions, Midwest, East, South, West. The 16 teams in each of these divisions play until there is only one left, hence the final four. This leads to the East and West champions and the South and Midwest teams playing each other. Each winner advances and is sent to the finals where the winner receives the men’s division I title for college basketball.

However, these teams aren’t the only winners when it comes to this tournament. A huge portion of this event that makes it so popular is that there is a massive betting culture around it. Any person that wants to can create a bracket attempting to predict every game outcome through the whole tournament, can! There are so many possibilities that a comparable probability to guessing the outcome of every game is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That is of course not taking into account the probability of each individual game based on seeding and statistics.

Betting takes place on countless websites and locations but the major places are the brackets created online by ESPN, CBS and other sports companies. The prizes for the best bracket can go up to 10 million dollars for a perfect bracket. On top of this most sites that are used for betting are free to enter perfect brackets! The first bracket pooling ever done was thought to have happened in 1977 but it did not become popular until the 2000s.

There has not always been such a turnout for this tournament because it came from humble beginnings. The first-ever March tournament was run by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, as time progressed the NCAA slowly took over adding more and more teams. Now with the 64 involved teams every year the tournament is one of the largest spectacles in sports each year. Schools that qualify and do well in this tournament are rewarded alongside the teams’ success. Each school is paid in units from their tournament winnings, this year one unit is worth almost 340, 000 dollars. The more games that a team wins the more money the school receives. Overall it’s a great event from all angles. Go ahead and make a bracket and watch some games because it happens every march and you don’t want to miss it!