The Holy Grail of sports betting is filling out a perfect March Madness bracket. It has eluded all sports bettors since the dawn of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament and gambling, but there is always hope.
Is this finally the year someone is still Mr. Perfect come early April?
Below, I'll look at whether (or not) there are any perfect brackets remaining. We contacted two of the major operators of bracket contests, ESPN and Yahoo!, to find out if there were any Pied Pipers of Perfection still standing tall in 2026.
We are also keeping close tabs on Kalshi's Billion Dollar Bracket contest as the tourney plays out.
Are there any perfect brackets left?
Sunday morning, prior to the tip-off of Miami vs. Purdue, there were just two perfect brackets remaining in ESPN’s Bracket Challenge. A whopping 26,567,855 brackets had fallen.
ESPN displayed the two brackets remaining prior to Sunday’s games. One contestant had Duke winning it all, while the other had Michigan taking home the National Title.
Over at Yahoo!, there were zero perfect brackets remaining after Round of 32 play on Saturday.
Saturday morning, prior to tip-off of Michigan-Saint Louis, there were still 195 perfect brackets remaining at ESPN.com — compared to last year on Saturday morning of the first weekend of the tournament, when they had just 121 perfect brackets remaining.
After Day 1 of the tournament this year at Yahoo!, just .0381% of brackets were still perfect, with No. 11 Texas, No. 11 VCU, and No. 12 High Point doing most of the damage on Thursday.
It is estimated that the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.22 quintillion.
The first two full days of March Madness saw some upsets that had an impact on March Madness odds. None were of the Earth-shattering variety, like a 1 or 2 seed going down (that was reserved for last night when Florida went down), but there were enough to eliminate most people’s brackets from perfection.
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Are there any perfect brackets left in the Kalshi Billion Dollar Perfect Bracket Challenge?
As of Sunday morning, there were no perfect brackets remaining in Kalshi’s Billion Dollar Perfect Bracket Challenge.
However, Kalshi will give $1 million to the person in the contest with the best overall bracket. User “KingMe03” predicted all games correctly ahead of Sunday’s contests, except for UCLA over UCF, and is in the catbird seat to win that contest.
On Friday, Kalshi tweeted that there were just 83 perfect brackets remaining. Of those 83 brackets that remained at the time, 30.1% picked Duke to win it all. Other popular National Title picks were Arizona (20.5%), Michigan (16.9%), Houston (8.4%), and Purdue (4.8%).
