Probability Facts

You're more likely to die in a car accident driving to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the Powerball jackpot.

A coin toss isn't 50/50. Research shows a flipped coin is slightly more likely to land on the side that was facing up when tossed — about 51% of the time. The effect is even stronger when a coin is spun rather than flipped, because the heavier "heads" side acts as a counterweight.

You share your birthday with at least 9 other million people in the world.

There are 635,013,559,599 possible hands in a game of bridge.

If you flip a coin ten times, the odds against its coming up with the same side showing each time are 1,023 to 1.

A woman from Michigan named Barbara Soper gave birth on 10/10/10, 09/09/09 and 08/08/08 – the odds of which are 50 million to one.

Joan Ginther won the Texas lottery four times between 1993 and 2010, collecting $20.4 million. The odds of one person doing that by chance - roughly 1 in 18 septillion. Investigators later discovered she had a PhD in statistics from Stanford and had been studying scratch-off distribution patterns.