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

In the most ideal world, the punter would pick a favorite for each match and there would be no upsets. If they did, they would get $10 million. But the chances of that happening are, quite rightly, pretty slim. In fact, a tournament with zero has never happened in Grand Slam history.

Last year, 13 seeds (placed in the top 32) were knocked out by an unseeded player in the first round of the tournament alone, meaning that anyone picking just a matchup favorite would be wrong 13 times after the first round.

“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’s so much chance, variability, close games, variation in individuals, differences in performance across days,” Humphries said. “No matter how much you know about the game, it’s nearly impossible to get 127 decisions right.”

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

Tennis Australia knows the chances are so slim because they didn’t come up with the idea. It’s actually a favorite of Warren Buffett, who routinely offers his employees huge sums of cash if they can correctly guess every outcome of the 67 games of “March Madness,” the big annual men’s and women’s college basketball tournament. No one has ever done it, but luckily for his staff, the consolation prize is slightly higher than what Tennis Australia is offering, at $100,000 for the next best guesses.

Responding to the growing number of our experts, Phil Brook, Tennis Australia’s director of audience, said: “It’s a big challenge to pick 127 winners, but if someone has the skill, there’s a huge $10 million prize. Last night, against all odds, we saw an amateur beat the world’s best players and the world’s players win $1 million. I know that anything is possible in tennis.

“In addition to the $10 million top prize, there are two $10,000 prizes to be won by the top group in each of the men’s and women’s main draws. So it’s definitely worth checking out.”

“Bracket challenges are huge in the US. During March Madness…everyone fills one out and watches the tournament. Even Barack Obama filled out his bracket when he was in the White House. In Australia, tipping the footy and sweeping the Melbourne Cup is 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. This is because if it was purely based on chance, TA would have to pay to register the competition as a trade promotion lottery in several Australian states and agree to be regulated by state authorities.

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Either way, the $10 million offer is a sure bet to draw more attention to the brand partnership between Tennis Australia and Nexo, which Professor Alex Russell of CQUniversity’s Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory said was useful because those with a chance to win $10 million might also be the sort to try the cryptocurrency.

“It fits into the whole crypto sentiment that you can make a lot of money really quickly,” he said.

Tennis Australia’s partnership with the company follows a re-emerging trend of sporting organizations partnering 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 higher amounts, including a US$45 million ($67 million) fine from the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 for operating an unregistered loan product. It is banned from the U.S. market in some states, but exited entirely in December 2022 due to an SEC investigation and was fined an additional $500,000 on Wednesday for making loans to California residents without valid licenses in 2022.

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But the Cayman Islands-based crypto firm launched its campaign to re-enter the US when its co-founder Antoni Trenchev aligned himself with US President Donald Trump last year, sponsoring a tour of Eastern Europe and a golf championship at a Trump-owned course in Scotland. In a statement to Reuters in October, a company spokesman said the return to the US was “not related 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 – exactly where Nexo has positioned itself. Our partnership reflects a shared commitment to disciplined performance and long-term thinking.”

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