The more you flip a coin the more you will have an equal amount of heads and tails....?

Question

My question is why does this happen?

I was told if you could flip a coin an infinite amount of times you would have and equal amount of heads and tails or the more you flip a coin the more balanced it will be. I am not doubting this, but I would just like to know why this happens, why should there not always be more heads than tails or more tails than heads?

Why will it balance itself out?

sorry, English is not my mother tongue.

Answer 1

If your coin is "fair" (i.e. it is not biased toward heads or tails because of an uneven weight distribution or something like that), then each time you flip the coin, you have *exactly* 1/2 chance of getting heads and 1/2 chance of getting tails. Under these circumstances, the "Law of Large Numbers" from probability theory tells you that the ratio of heads to tails will converge (get closer and closer) to 1 as the number of flips increases toward infinity. Now, this doesn't mean that you will have the same number of heads and tails, this just means that the difference between heads and tails will be more and more negligible when compared to the number of flips.

Answer 2

there is a one in two chance every time you flip the coin that is will come up heads or a 50% chance the chance is repeated every time so you could flip a coin billions of times the chance each time you flip it will always be 50%

Answer 3

because it meant that way. more than two side is different story

Answer 4

IMO, it shouldn't necessarily balance itself out.

Answer 5

Absolutely! The odd is 50% that each flip yield either a head or tail.

Answer 6

The law of large numbers. . .

If you flip a coin only twice, you can get heads twice, tails twice, or one of each; the more and more you flip it, the more likely it will "even out" till the point where the observed probability matches the statistical probability.

That's how casinos make money, they know eventually with enough people, even with some winners they will always win in the end.

Answer 7

OK Basically, the way to look at it is like this:

Since you are flipping the coin an infinite amount of times, the coin will come up heads an infinite number of times and tails an infinite number of times.  That is the simple explanation.

Also, there are an infinite number of combinations of streaks (i.e. HHHT, HHTT, etc) that are infinitely long.

Answer 8

Probability states that if you have an equal number of sides (2) then you should have half heads and half tails. However, if you actually do the experiment, you will probably find that there are more tails than heads....that's just how it seems to work out.

Answer 9

I love these statistical freaks.  The answer is 51% for heads due to the uneven weight distribution on the coin.

Answer 10

Tough to say but it all has to do with probability. The coin has a 50/50 chance either way but there is a chance...PROBABILITY being the key...it is what is most likely to happen but there is also a course of indifference where there may in fact be more than the other...

Answer 11

Actually No. it is all chance.