Eli5: Gamblers fallacy

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How is it that when you flip a coin 10 times, the likely hood that it’ll land on heads 10 times in a row is extremely small but the likely hood that it’ll land on heads is 50/50 if it already landed on heads 9 times? I get that it’s a closed system and its roughly 50/50 for every coin flip but my brain is just telling me that it should be a higher chance that it would land on tails instead of heads. How does this work?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

After 9 tosses, the chance you have 9 heads is ~1/500.

On the tenth toss – you still have a 50% chance of heads or tails.

You may now have ten heads which is pretty rare, about ~1/1000.

Or you may have 9 heads and a tail – equally as rare, ~1/1000.

In fact any sequence of 10 heads/tails is equally as rare.

Comparing chance of ten heads to not-ten-heads: 1/1000 vs 999/1000

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