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I just worked out her idea in my head.
Oh man! What a beautiful scheme or bet!

A Smithsonian magazine piece once said- A man kept himself in beer, all though college, by- betting people that he could make a quarter come up heads…three times in a row.
[ I guess he didn’t win ALL the time, but playing with 50% odds was good enough for him].

that’s 1/8. any particular set of 3 coin flips will only happen 1 in 8 times, unless you start playing funky with conditional probabilities.

best guess he kept flipping over and over and any string of three was counted as a win.

Arrgh! I should have done the math, and figured that out. Oh well.
Well, [that] will teach me to believe what’s put in a magazine’s pictures. :D

At no point does she mention flipping coins. Where are you getting that from? I’m not sure what the game is called but I know it as 753.

Heck…no place at all. *shrugs*
I just thought I’d mention another bar game.
Sorry if I messed with your day, dude.

It’s fine, you just phrased it in a way that made it sound like you knew what she was doing, then went on a total tangent.

Sounds to me like she’s playing “Nim”, a game of “take-away” (using 3-or-more piles of coins) that was already old in Shakespeare’s day. The name comes from “Nym”, an ‘Old Scottish’ word meaning ‘to steal’. The British treated the final coin as a WINNING move, but when the final coin is treated as a LOSING move, this is how it’s played in France, & they call this strategy “misere” (w/an accent over the last ‘e’). Both forms of the game can be won by using the same strategy, up until the final few turns.

Actually I can do that too.
I don’t know how but when I flipped a coin (1 DM) it always did the same (odd number of flips and landed on the side that was down before. Never used it to bet though.

Yeah, I used to do that too, always using a £2 coin, I had a good % accuracy. Until stupidly I told the girl I was seeing that I could do it, and was never allowed to use coin flips to settle arguments again. Had a good run though :)

It’s not that hard to always get heads if you’re quick on the reaction and the other person doesn’t notice the trend.

I used to use it all the time on people. Then, for fun, on my daughter when playing the Pokémon CCG, which uses coin flipping.

Flip the coin. Catch it in the palm of your hand. If it’s heads, hold your palm out to them. If it’s tails, flip it onto the back of your other hand and hold your hand out to them.

There’s always this bet you can do, to trick your target, and win all the time, like:
“I bet you I CAN’T do five push-ups.” [I’m not suggesting that you do this, ok].

A bet you can’t lose: Bet someone that you can push something in a wheelbarrow for a given distance and that they can’t push it back.
Then tell them to get in the wheelbarrow.

Bit hard to replicate in a bar over and over…

You must live in an urbane area. Out here in the weeds, folk walk into the bars (plural) with all manner of odd farming implements. We still see tractors on Main street.
Happy birthday, and many happy returns!
News flash: science has proven that people who celebrate more birthdays live longer! Here’s to another trip around the sun for all of us.

“If you eat an apple a day, for 400,000 days, you will live to be 100 years old.”- Walt Kelly, author of the comic strip- Pogo.

More like 1000 years old, but why quibble?

I imagine that you’ve assessed it, but Walt Kelly liked to write things that are humorous in nature. ;)

I enjoy your posts.
And “we have met the enemy…”
Albert, M’msel Hepsibah, the Loan Arranger, I miss them all.

Thanks. :D
I miss Kelly’s Pogo comic strips / books of collected strips, also.
I’m often quoting stories about Pogo, Churchy, Albert, + Porky, to my friends.
The cartoonist dude, Kelly, was a master. :)

Oh, I DO remember this…it was actually a plot device in one of those old “Great Brain” stories. Those were great when I was a kid.

Nim is a take-away game. Tgere are a lot of them. Conway’sbook on Numbers and Games analyses many of them and develops them into a new construction for numbers. Right up to infinities.

Maybe I’m the target audience for this particular scheme, but I really don’t fully understand it.
Let’s say you have a 100 coins in the pile. If on any persons turn they can take as many coins they want, but if they take the last coin they lose… what’s to stop a person on their turn from simply taking 99 coins? At that point it boils down to “who goes first, they win”.
So yeah, not sure if I’m missing the point, I just broke this game, or if this is intentionally supposed to work on drunks. The “All But One” strat seems to break this game.

Generally there’s a limit on how many coins you can take in a turn such as 1-4 coins per turn.

I’m sure I’ve seen this sorta game in a SNES RPG somewhere as well.

There are multiple piles of coins, and the setup is very specific. It’s called Nim, as was mentioned elsewhere. And to clarify, if he takes the last coin of ALL piles. He can take the last coin of a given pile, but the last coin on the table he CANNOT take.

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