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The students were tasked to craft a story about a coin toss—the simple gamble of Heads or Tails.

 MINGO…deploys a fictitious walk to school to dispel the belief that a coin toss is a 50/50 proposition.

Not Quite 50/50

There I was, at the crossroad between me, my brother, and five dollars. And the fate of the money was all up to a coin toss.  Allow me to start from the beginning. 

It was a relatively gloomy school morning. I must have been in eighth grade, my brother in sixth grade. Along with my dad who always walked us to school, we were making haste toward the school. When the time came to cross the street, the pedestrian signal (the walking man) illuminated a bright white in the gray day, and I grabbed my dad’s hand and began to cross the street. That was a rule of his. Whenever crossing the street, you first check if the walking man is up, then, look both ways, stay inside the crosswalk, and hold his hand. This never irked me. My dad, as an auto-accident lawyer, had seen a lot of things in his work, and he knew best. My brother, on the other hand, was more of a rebel, and despite my dad’s plead, he did not hold his hand. Instead, my brother decided to stay as far away from my dad as possible. Now that I am reminiscing about the circumstance, I believe they had gotten into a fight the previous day. So my brother opted to be a free bird crossing the street, while I was confined to my dad’s side. 

Of course, my brother being free meant that he could go as fast or slow as he wanted. That ability became his strength when we both saw it. Green paper lay on the ground. From my distance I couldn’t make out what the bill read, but I knew it was money. It could be a dollar, it could be a hundred. I saw my best friend, my own brother, eye that money, and look back at me. We maintained eye contact for a second, and then he broke it, bolting forward. I tried to do the same but my dad (who hadn’t realized what was at stake) held me back. I was trapped, and I had to watch as my brother grabbed up the money. Five dollars.
My dad, the one technically, responsible for my loss of five dollars, made a proposal. A coin toss. The winner keeps the money. To this day, I have no idea why my brother would agree to such a gamble. It was already his money. He was the first to get to it. Dad pulled out a quarter from his pocket. I observed that the starting face of the coin was tails. He threw it up high into the air, and I watched it bend into the color of the sky, and then fall, flipping all the way down. Dad looked at me first.

“Call it.” He said.

“Tails,” I confidently exclaimed. My brother shifted in his spot.

After he revealed the coin, I was claimed the winner. My brother, the loser, pouted. I had information that he didn’t after all. 

A coin toss isn’t 50/50. 

The chance of a coin landing on the side it started on is 50.8 percent more likely. You are probably under the assumption that my success in the toss got me five dollars; that is unfortunately incorrect. Just as the odds of a coin toss are nearly 51/49, the embellishments-to-truth ratio in this story is the same. There was no coin toss, nor did I get the money. 

Mingo Cord

January 30,2026