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Things About Probability That You Probably Didn’t Know

If you take a look at all the events that take place around you in a day, you may think that they happen at random.

One of your colleagues finds some money in the street. Another stumbles upon a dislocated cobblestone and falls over, spilling the content of his water bottle all over the passers-by. Good luck, bad luck, you may think, and go on with your life. What you’ve seen, in turn, manifest itself when you saw the above events is probability in all its glory.

“Probability” is the expression of how likely something is to happen. For example, when you throw a stone up in the sky, the probability of it falling back down to the ground is 100% or 1 in 1 – and the probability of it falling on your head is 50% or 1 in 2. This also happens to be the odds of winning (and losing) on any game at Betway – you either win or lose. As you might expect, though, in the case of gambling, there are more factors at play. And probability itself is way more complicated than it seems. Here are some things you probably don’t know about it – but are fascinating.

A coin toss

Flipping a coin is generally considered the fairest way to decide something – after all, the probability of the coin to land with its heads or tails facing upward is 50% each. This is, in turn, not entirely true thanks to physics. The “heads” side of a coin is usually a bit heavier – the difference seems insignificant but it does bend the odds in its favour. In theory, both outcomes have a 50% chance. In real life, the probability of a coin landing with its “tails” side up is a bit higher.

Except when it is flipped with its “heads” side up – in which case, it will almost always land with “heads” up.

Winning the lottery

People often say “it’s like winning the lottery” when unlikely things happen. This makes you think how big one’s chances are to win the lottery at all? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The probability of picking all the right numbers at Lucky Number is pretty slim, considering that there are 3,628,800 different permutations. Winning it comes with odds of 1 in 5,720,645,481,903 – which is pretty slim. By comparison, the chances of you being struck by lightning are just 1 in 158,000… If you switch to Bonus Lotto, your chances improve slightly (there are 6 numbers drawn from a pool of 42, after all): your chances to pick all the right numbers are 1 in 5,245,786.

Fun probabilities

There are a few pretty improbable things but they still happen. For example, while eating oysters, your odds of finding a pearl in one of them is 1 in 12,000. Finding two pearls in the same oyster are much less likely – the odds of it happening are 1 in 2 million.

The odds of being hit by an asteroid – a huge one that can cause a massive, global catastrophe – are pretty slim, 1 in 50,000. It is still a better chance than being killed in a terrorist attack – 1 in 9.3 million. And an even better chance than being killed by a shark (1 in 11.5 million).

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