The Australian Open is offering $10 million for one lucky fan. But there’s almost no way to win

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The Australian Open is advertising a competition in which punters can win $10 million for predicting the result of all 127 matches in either the men’s or women’s draw at the grand slam.

It would be a steep payout for Tennis Australia, but the odds of correctly predicting that many matches are so low that it’s statistically easier to win the lottery.

Tennis Australia is offering $10 million to anyone who can correctly guess 127 match results.

Tennis Australia will likely award 0.1 per cent of the $10 million as a consolation prize to the highest tally. So even though the organisation has bragged that the $10 million is the largest tennis prize in the world, experts say it is really only a competition for $10,000.

The $10 Million Bracket Challenge was announced on Tuesday in partnership with Nexo, a cryptocurrency platform and the Open’s first “official crypto partner”. The competition requires fans to correctly predict the result of 127 matches in either the men’s or women’s draw.

“This is a game of skill, not chance,” Tennis Australia chief commercial officer Cedric Cornelis said in the press release. “The AO Bracket Challenge is about rewarding tennis knowledge and creating an exciting new way for fans to engage with the tournament.”

With help from University of Adelaide statistician Melissa Humphries and applied probability lecturer Angus Hamilton Lewis, here’s why no one at Tennis Australia is overly concerned.

If we start by assuming each player has an equal chance of winning every match, there are 170 undecillion possible outcomes. If you’ve never heard that term before, it means there are 36 zeros after 170 or 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The probability of guessing this is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000005877 ... (it goes on).

Could you predict the winner of all 127 men’s or women’s matches at the Australian Open?

An avid fan of the sport may only pick the favourite of every match, and if we’re generous and assume the favourites always have an 85 per cent chance of winning each match, fans still only have a one in 920,000,000 chance of predicting the 127 brackets correctly.

In the most ideal world, a punter would pick the favourite for every match and there would be no upsets. If they did, they’d pocket $10 million. But the chances of that happening are, you guessed it, pretty slim. In fact, a zero-upset tournament has never occurred in grand slam history.

Last year, 13 seeded players (ranked in the top 32) were knocked out by an unseeded player in the first round of the tournament alone, meaning anyone that only picked match favourites would be wrong 13 times after just the first round.

One lucky fan could ride an Alex de Minaur hot streak all the way to $10 million.

“Even if we use the best possible predictive techniques we have in statistics and machine learning, we can still only get that probability down to one in a billion because there is so much chance, variability, close games, changes in individuals, differences in performance on days,” Humphries said. “No matter how much you know about the game, it’s almost impossible to get 127 decisions correct.”

On the other hand, “If you don’t enter, then your chances of winning are precisely zero,” she said. “Even if your chance of winning is one in a billion – that’s still better than zero, even though it’s very close to zero.”

Tennis Australia knows the chances are that slim because it didn’t come up with the idea. It’s actually a favourite of Warren Buffett, who routinely offers huge sums of cash for his employees if they can correctly guess every outcome of the 67 games of “March Madness”, the big annual tournament in men’s and women’s college basketball. No one has ever done it, but luckily for his employees, the consolation prize is a little more than what Tennis Australia is offering, at $US100,000 for the next best guesses.

In response to our experts’ number crunching, Tennis Australia director of audience Phil Brook said: “Picking 127 winners is a big challenge, but there’s a huge prize of $10 million if someone has the skill to do it. Last night, against all odds, we saw an amateur beat the world’s best men and women players to win $1 million. So, in tennis, anything’s possible.

“In addition to the $10 million grand prize there are two $10,000 prizes that will be won by the best bracket in each of the men’s and women’s main draws. So, it’s definitely worth having a go.

Nexo co-founder Antoni Trenchev with US president Donald Trump at the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeen, Scotland.

“Bracket challenges are huge in the US. During March Madness … everyone fills one out and follows the tournament. Even Barack Obama filled out his bracket while in the White House. In Australia, footy tipping and Melbourne Cup sweeps are a tradition, and we plan to make the AO Bracket Challenge another great Australian tradition.”

Tennis Australia says it is a competition based on skill and not chance. That’s because if it were purely based on chance, TA would have had to pay to register the competition as a trade promotion lottery in several Australian states, and agree to be regulated by state bodies.

Either way, the offer of $10 million is a sure bet to get more eyes on the brand partnership between Tennis Australia and Nexo, which professor Alex Russell, from the Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory at CQUniversity, said was handy given those likely to take a chance at winning $10 million may also be the kind to try out cryptocurrency.

“It fits in with that whole crypto vibe of you can make a tonne of money real quick,” he claimed.

Tennis Australia’s partnership with the company follows a re-emerging trend for sports organisations to pair with crypto platforms. The Open is Nexo’s fourth partnership with a tennis event – and they could certainly afford the $10 million.

The company has paid out heftier amounts, including a $US45 million ($67 million) fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US in 2023 for operating an unregistered lending product. It is barred from entering the US market in certain states but left entirely in December 2022 because of the SEC investigation, and on Wednesday was fined another $US500,000 for making loans to California residents without valid licences in 2022.

But, the Cayman Islands-based crypto firm began its campaign to re-enter the US as co-founder Antoni Trenchev cosied up to US president Donald Trump last year, sponsoring a tour of Eastern Europe and a golf championship on a Trump-owned course in Scotland. In a statement to Reuters in October, a company spokesperson said the return to the US “was not linked to Mr Trenchev’s interactions with Donald Trump Jr or the president of the United States”.

When the Australian Open announced its partnership with Nexo in December, Trenchev said: “The Australian Open stands at the intersection of excellence and ambition – precisely where Nexo positions itself. Our partnership reflects a shared commitment to disciplined performance and long-term thinking.”

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