Back when I was kid in middle school, called junior high in those days, two or three friends and I would hang out in the boy’s locker room after gym class for a few minutes and flip coins, calling heads or tails. If you guessed it, you got it. If not, you paid the nickel, dime or quarter.
At first, I just watched, probably because I didn’t have any change in my pocket. But one day I took my turn and correctly guessed nine of ten flips, and cleaned up. The next day, my luck continued. I just knew whether it was going to be heads or tails, and that baffled the other guys. After that we didn’t play the game anymore, and that was the end of it. I’ve tried to repeat the phenomena a number of times, but never seem to get much better than the average – 50-50. Maybe it was because money was involved that my focus was stronger and I was somehow able to ‘see’ whether it would be heads or tails.
The memory of that experience came back to me recently when I was reading about a 17th century French gambler named Antoine Gombaud chevalier de Mere. Until 1654, de Mere did quite well at the gambling tables. Then his luck changed so he decided to invoke probability theory to help his cause.
One of de Mere’s favorite wagers involved four rolls of a single die. To win, he had to roll a six at least once. Because of his success, no one would wager against him. So he changed the game to include a pair of dice. He wagered that he would roll a double six within 24 tosses. De Mere believed that he would win two out of three times. But instead, he lost regularly.
Unable to find the flaw in his own logic, de Mere wrote to his friend Blaise Pascal, one of France’s most famous mathematicians. Even though Pascal wasn’t a gambler, he was fascinated by the question. He recruited fellow philosopher Pierre de Fermat and they corresponded over a four-month period. The result was Traite du Triangle Arithmetique, a landmark book of probability theory.
Pascal and Fermat found that de Mere was a long way from the two thirds odds he had imagined. Actually, his chances of winning were less than even–49 in 100. However, by adding one roll, the odds improved to 51 out of 100. To reach his favored two out of three wins, he would have to allow for 39 rolls.
While gamblers who win consistently are probably using probability theory to their advantage, I think there’s another factor at play – the power of the mind to affect or detect the roll of the dice, the flip of a coin, or the turn of a card. However, as soon as the process turns repetitive and monotonous, the average goes down. It seems that over time even the lure of large piles of chips ultimately loses its appeal and the psychic advantage fades.
I’d like to hear how others with psi abilities perform in games of chance.



















