Scientists Discovered That Coin Tosses Do NOT Actually Have A 50/50 Chance Of Landing On Heads Or Tails

Harry How. Getty Images.

Popular Mechanics- Before you call heads or tails, peek at the side of the coin facing up. You’ll improve your odds of getting it right by calling for the side facing up. Scientists say the “overwhelming evidence for a same-side bias” is proved out by the results of 350,757 coin flips.

Frantisek Bartos, a psychological methods PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, led a pre-print study published on arXiv that built off the 2007 paper from Stanford mathematician Persi Diaconis asserting “that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started.”

Diaconis estimated the same-side outcome was 51 percent. “Our data lend strong support to this precise prediction,” Bartos writes in the paper, “the coins landed on the same side more often than not.” With a same-side bias in the new study played out across more than 350,000 coin flips at 50.8 percent, Bartos says that may not seem like powerful evidence, but he calls it “compelling statistical support for Diaconis’ physics model of coin tossing.”

In the 2007 paper, Diaconis says that “coin tossing is physics not random.” He points to how a spring-loaded coin tossing machine can be manipulated to ensure a coin starting heads-up lands that way 100 percent of the time. When the spring releases and the coin flips, it has a natural spin. Careful adjustment can work the physics into a precise landing point. “Naturally tossed coins obey the laws of mechanics and their flight is determined by their initial conditions,” he writes.

Look, I want to shove these nerds in a locker for trying to take away the meaning of a Coin Flip using fancy terms like "arXiv" as much as the next guy. But as Tiko Texas once eloquently put it, numbers never lie. Besides anybody that is mental enough to flip a coin more than 350,000 times and record if it landed on heads or tails deserves our attention if not our RE2PECT.

For years Big Coin bamboozled the world about coin flips being 50/50 while dividing us with catchy monikers like Tails Never Fails (which it most certainly does). 

Meanwhile those flips were more rigged than The Dozen, which I bet has Harvey Dent stroking the non-charred side of his dick off to this study since he was a notorious double-headed coin flipper before The Joker fucked up his world.

Okay, that got a little bit away from me. While we're on the subject, Katie Holmes getting turned into ash would've hit 100000000000000 times harder than Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holmes not returning as Rachel Dawes is the only flaw of that near-perfect movie.

Anyway, I think the only fair way to flip a coin now is to catch it blindly in midair then flip it on your hand, right? Because I feel like the chance of where you catch it makes it much closer to a 50/50 chance than this disgusting 50.8/49.2 percentage. Or maybe we just need to start flipping coins like my Ziti brother Eddie, who is so fair and just that he will defy the logics of physics to fairly flip a coin since I can't figure out any other reason he could possibly do this.

P.S. Shout out Getty Images for giving me that picture from Super Bowl XLII as one of the top results when I searched "Coin flip". I couldn't think of a better image from a better day to use as the thumbnail for this blog.