The Spin | Big Bash’s flipping bats recall stories of cunning ploys with tossed coins

When you look closely at the ritual, it begins to seem odd that cricket lets blind luck and ‘dynamical bias’ play such a large part

When he was 14, Persi Diaconis packed a fresh deck of cards and a spare pair of socks into a knapsack and ran away from home to become a magician’s assistant. He spent the next few years apprenticing with Dai Vernon, whose sleight of hand was so smart, so sharp, that he even beat Harry Houdini, who famously claimed he could pick any magic trick on the third go, until Vernon fooled him seven times in a row. They used to call Vernon ‘the Professor’, and now they do Diaconis, too. Because that’s what he is. The Mary V Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics, to be exact, at Stanford, where he’s been continuing his lifelong study of chance and probability.

Diaconis made his name studying card shuffling, but he’s also done a lot of work on the one part of a cricket match no one ever really stops to think about. The coin toss. “When was the last time anyone watched the coin toss or really focused on it?” says the head of the Big Bash, Kim McConnie. Which is why, this season, captains in the Big Bash won’t be tossing coins but bats, “specially weighted to make sure that it is 50-50”. They’ll be calling “hills or flats”, just like children playing backyard cricket. McConnie says: “We’re making it much more relevant to families, we are creating a moment which is much more fitting with kids.”

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