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Mathematical Miracle or Cruel Fate? India's Record-Breaking 15-Toss Losing Streak Explained

Probuddha Bhattacharjee

Ollie Pope and Shubman Gill during the toss of the fifth Test [Source: @cricbuzz/x.com]Ollie Pope and Shubman Gill during the toss of the fifth Test [Source: @cricbuzz/x.com]

The counterpart of Shubman Gill changed for the Fifth Test of the India tour of England 2025 at the Kennington Oval, but his fortunes with the toss did not. The Indian skipper called the wrong side of the coin once more, and that marked India's 15th Toss loss in as many games.  

The probability of this occurring is 1 in 32,768. A number so rare and so remote that it would need some mathematical explanations to understand its significance.

Identical to Gaming's Perfect Scenarios

To grasp the magnitude of this incident: This streak of India has the same odds as rolling the same number on five eight-sided dice rolls, or correctly answering 15 true/false questions by pure guessing.

It is exactly twice as unlikely as correctly predicting all 14 NFL playoff games (1 in 16,384). 

Even Dr. Strange Wouldn't Bet Against These Odds

To put this in perspective using Dr. Strange's famous calculation: when he peered into 14,000,605 possible futures, the Avengers won in only one. That's a probability of 1 in 14,000,605—making India's toss streak 427 times more likely than the Avengers' impossible victory over Thanos.

In other pop culture terms, India's streak is 9 times rarer than C-3PO's famously impossible odds of "successfully navigating an asteroid field" (1 in 3,720), yet 31 times more probable than Lloyd's chances with Mary in Dumb and Dumber (1 in 1,000,000).

For gamers, it's 4 times rarer than finding a shiny Pokémon in the original games (1 in 8,192), but far more likely than finding a naturally complete End Portal in Minecraft.

Cricket's Mathematical Impossibility

So far, around 8,500 international matches have been played in cricket. Statistically speaking, we would expect 15 tosses lost once every 32,768 matches. International cricket is just about quarter-way to that threshold, making this a black swan event, arriving far earlier than expected.

Even Test matches ending in ties, one of the rarest results possible in the format, which has just two occurrences in 2,681 matches, is 25 times more likely to happen. 

The Coin's Cruel Justice

Remarkably, despite losing 15 consecutive tosses across formats and captains, from Suryakumar Yadav through Rohit Sharma to Shubman Gill, India have won most of these matches. This, infact, breaks the popular myth of the game that the toss mostly decides the fate of the game. 

Notably, this is the second time in the 21st century that a team has lost all the tosses in a 5-match Test series. Incidentally, both times - India in England.