Odd vs Even: Which Side Gives You the Best Chance of a Win?

I'm Laura and I'm Glencoe Elementary's OBOB coordinator. Before every battle we do a coin toss and the team who wins gets to pick whether they answer the odd questions or the even questions.

Almost every team this year appears to have decided amongst themselves that there is one side that gets "the better questions" or "the easiest questions." I found this interesting so I decided to keep track of how often the odd or even team won throughout our pool play battles this year.

We have 95 students in 22 teams so with 44 pool play battles, it felt like enough battles to start to see if there was a pattern.

The official tally sheet

As you can see, teams who answered the odd questions won 22 times. Teams with the even questions won 20 times. There were two ties where teams got the same score.

It really was almost 50/50 as you might expect but it was fun to see the results. Many of the kids will tell you that in the coin toss, "tails never fails." Others will say that's only true half of the time.

Maybe next year we will keep track!