What Are The Chances

Summary

Chance is a word that means different things to us in different contexts, but just what are the facts of a game of chance, and should we play?

What Are The Chances?

When we think of playing a game of chance, we tend to think of there being risk involved,because playing with chance is unpredictable and not something you can tie down. However, when we talk about chance in our daily lives we tend to give it a more positive spin.“There’sa good chance I’ll be home by five”.“There’s not much chance of rain today”. So, chance seems to be about the situation we place it in, relating to how we think of it. But what is the reality of chance?

50-50

A 50/50 chance will be presumed by most of us if we are playing with something that only has two possible outcomes. The most obvious is tossing a coin. That coin can only land one of two ways, so we’d estimate we have a 50/50 chance of being right. But in reality it doesn’t work like that. If we toss a coin 100 times it’s very unlikely we’d get tails 50 times, because chance is unpredictable. Think about it, just because something has two possible outcomes doesn’t mean each outcome has the same chance of happening. If we said, “I might star in a blockbuster movie this year”, depending on your situation, the chances of this not happening are probably higher than it happening, despite there only being two possible outcomes.

Is it plausible?

Our perception of chance is actually totally skewed. We believe something has a low chance of happening because it seems implausible, and yet those things do happen, while we believe something has a higher chance of happening because it seems more regular to us, and yet that thing might not happen to us at all. If we take rolling a dice we’ll see how this works. If someone says they roll 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in that order, is that more likely or less likely than them rolling six 6s in a row? Most of us would say the chance of rolling all those 6s is very slim, almost impossible, but rolling the other numbers is more likely. Why? Because we perceive the chance of rolling a different number each time to be higher than rolling the same number six times. In fact, both of these outcomes are very unlikely, the chances are equally low. Why is this? Yes, rolling the same number six times is rare, but rolling a very specific sequence of numbers is just as rare. We simply don’t think of it that way.

The fact is a game of chance is impossible to predict accurately. We can’t ever be sure of what the outcome will be, which is why we need to understand the risk involved. We can weigh up the evidence from previous games and calculate our risk, and if we are prepared to take it, but the bottom line is, when we play a game of chance we are taking our chances, and the risk implied in that last statement is what we need to remember.