Coin flipping
When the coin comes to rest, the toss is complete and the party who called correctly or was assigned the upper side is declared the winner.
A computational model suggests that the chance of a coin landing on its edge and staying there is about 1 in 6000 for an American nickel.
Some high-profile coin tosses, such as those in the Cricket World Cup and the Super Bowl, use custom-made ceremonial medallions.
In a game theoretic analysis it provides even odds to both sides involved, requiring little effort and preventing the dispute from escalating into a struggle.
A competitive method may be used instead of a toss in some situations, for example in basketball the jump ball is employed, while the face-off plays a similar role in ice hockey.
The original XFL, a short-lived American football league, attempted to avoid coin tosses by implementing a face-off style "opening scramble," in which one player from each team tried to recover a loose football; the team whose player recovered the ball got first choice.
(The revived XFL, which launched in 2020, removed the coin toss altogether and allowed that decision to be made as part of a team's home field advantage.)
Before the early-1970s introduction of the penalty shootout, coin tosses were occasionally needed to decide the outcome of drawn matches where a replay was not possible.
The most famous instance of this was the semifinal game of the 1968 European Championship between Italy and the Soviet Union, which finished 0–0 after extra time.
Factors such as pitch conditions, weather and the time of day are considered by the team captain who wins the toss.
[12] Fédération Internationale d'Escrime rules use a coin toss to determine the winner of some fencing matches that remain tied at the end of a "sudden death" extra minute of competition.
[14] In addition to its practical applications in sports, coin tossing is symbolic of the democratic principle of equal opportunity.
When two parties face an impasse, the act of flipping a coin signifies a commitment to impartiality and a willingness to accept the outcome, no matter how arbitrary it may seem.
"Drawing of lots" is one of the methods to break ties to determine a winner in an election; the coin flip is considered an acceptable variant.
[19] Also, a number of states provide for "drawing lots" in the event an election ends in a tie, and this is usually resolved by a coin toss or picking names from a hat.
[citation needed] A 2017 election to the 94th District of the Virginia House of Delegates resulted in a tie between Republican incumbent David Yancey and Democratic challenger Shelly Simmonds, with exactly 11,608 votes each.
Under state law, the election was to be decided by drawing a name from a bowl, although a coin toss would also have been an acceptable option.
[20] Additionally, the outcome of the draw determined control of the entire House, as Republicans won 50 of the other 99 seats and Democrats 49.
They have demonstrated that a mechanical coin flipper which imparts the same initial conditions for every toss has a highly predictable outcome – the phase space is fairly regular.
Further, in actual flipping, people exhibit slight bias – "coin tossing is fair to two decimals but not to three.
[citation needed] Human intuition about conditional probability is often very poor and can give rise to some seemingly surprising observations.
"[30] Danish poet Piet Hein's 1966 book Grooks includes a poem, "A Psychological Tip", on a similar theme: Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, And you're hampered by not having any, The best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, Is simply by spinning a penny.
No—not so that chance shall decide the affair While you're passively standing there moping; But the moment the penny is up in the air, You suddenly know what you're hoping.
