Coin tosses are actually not 50/50, study shows
Don't put your money on a coin toss!
It is common in sports that a coin toss will take place before a game starts to help determine aspects of the game.
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Who will start with the ball, which side will a team or player be playing to, who serves first, etc.
Even if you do not know a lot about probability, most individuals would assume that because a coin only has two sides, you are more often than not 50% likely to get heads or tails during a coin toss.
As it turns out, we are all completely wrong.
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Researchers have set out to determine as closely as possible how the side the coin lands on is determined and what could help determine the side the coin lands on.
In 2007, mathematician Persi Diaconis and fellow researchers published a study in which they determined coins to have dynamical bias during a coin toss.
Now, a new group of researchers set out to figure out the coin-tossing odds and they had to do a massive 350,757 coin tosses for their study.
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The Diaconis model states that the coin lands on the same side they were tossed from 51% of the time.
The new team completed 350,757 coin tosses, using 46 different currencies and found a 50.8% chance that the coin would land on the same side it had started on.
There is even evidence that the tosser of the coin could have an ever so slight influence on the toss as some have a strong same-side bias and others none at all.
We also found considerable variance in the same-side bias between our 48 tossers. The bias varied with a standard deviation of 1.6%, CI [1.2%, 2.0%], in our sample. The variation could be explained by a different degree of "wobbliness" between our tossers.
— František Bartoš (@BartosFra) October 9, 2023
The team do recommend that if coin-flips are used for high stakes decision-making, it is best to keep the coin concealed while it is in the starting position.
Now you have a new little trick to hide up your sleeve.
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Main image courtesy of iStock/lakshmiprasad S