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Scientists tossed a whopping 350,757 coins and found it isn’t the 50-50 proposition many think.
“Despite the widespread popularity of coin flipping, few people pause to reflect on the notion that the outcome of a coin flip is anything but random: a coin flip obeys the laws of Newtonian physics in a relatively transparent manner,” the researchers wrote in their report.
They also also figured out how to tip the odds of a coin toss in your favor.
“According to the Diaconis model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up,” they wrote. “Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., ‘same-side bias’).”
The Diaconis model is named after award-winning mathematician (and former professional magician) Persi Diaconis.
He discovered in a 2007 study that a coin will land on the same side from which it was tossed around 51 percent of the time.
To test his findings, but with a much bigger sample size, this new group of researchers got 48 people to flip 46 different coins 350,757 times.
Their result?
A coin will land on the same side from which it was tossed around 51 percent of the time (50.8 percent, to be exact).
“Could future coin tossers use the same-side bias to their advantage?” the researchers wrote.
“The magnitude of the observed bias can be illustrated using a betting scenario. If you bet a dollar on the outcome of a coin toss (i.e., paying 1 dollar to enter, and winning either 0 or 2 dollars depending on the outcome) and repeat the bet 1,000 times, knowing the starting position of the coin toss would earn you 19 dollars on average.
“This is more than the casino advantage for 6 deck blackjack against an optimal-strategy player, where the casino would make 5 dollars on a comparable bet, but less than the casino advantage for single-zero roulette, where the casino would make 27 dollars on average.
“These considerations lead us to suggest that when coin flips are used for high-stakes decision-making, the starting position of the coin is best concealed.”