Famed Short Seller Wins Bloomberg NCAA Tournament Challenge

(Bloomberg) -- Jim Chanos has made a career on Wall Street out of betting against the crowd. In basketball, going with a favorite made him a winner.

Chanos, the short-seller who runs Kynikos Associates, correctly picked a No. 1 seed, University of Virginia, to win this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, giving him the victory over fellow Wall Street titans in Bloomberg’s Brackets for a Cause.

He got 48 out of 63 picks right -- including three of the Final Four -- for 174 points, outpacing Bruce Flatt, Brookfield Asset Management Inc.’s chief executive officer, with 167 and Tudor Investment Corp. founder and UVA graduate Paul Tudor Jones with 160.

Participants donated $10,000, with the total pot going to the charities of the three with the most accurate brackets. Chanos chose Médecins du Monde-Greece, Flatt was playing for Project Destined in the Bronx and Jones’s charity was Robin Hood, the anti-poverty group of which he is a co-founder.

Virginia had a couple nail-biters to get to the final, where it beat Texas Tech 85-77 in overtime Monday to win its first NCAA tournament. Virginia and Duke were popular choices in the contest, with two-thirds of competitors picking one of the Atlantic Coast Conference blue bloods. Michigan State knocked out Duke and freshman star Zion Williamson in the round of eight.

See the final results here

To contact the reporter on this story: Phil Serafino in Paris at pserafino@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Celeste Perri at cperri@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser, Eric Coleman

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