.195% Probability

Last evening, we were invited to attend our friends Hans & Teresa’s “bag” party. I had participated in this a couple years ago in a smaller incarnation and have to admit that it was fun. My other half, being the Meyers Briggs STJ wanted to know what to expect and how the evening would play out. Being the STJ myself, I knew it was hard for him to hear, “you just have to trust me.” He’s a good sport, and even though he wasn’t 100% healthy, he and I got on BART and headed over to the 510, which in Scott’s mind is a foreign country.

The instructions from the hosts were to bring a bag in which five items were placed. Two of the items were to be “good” items, two were to be “bad items” and one was to be neutral. In my bag were, from what I deemed to be good to bad, a $25 gift certificate to a French Bakery, an Alfani polo style shirt, a mug with a beautiful painting on it (of course I knew nothing of the artist), a palm sized soft soccer ball and a jar of homemade leftover pickling juice. The two good gifts were gifts from students that I was “regifting” and the mug was my take from the last "bag" party that I had held on to for precisely this night.

What is this “bag” party? Well it’s based on this toy that most of our generation knows from childhood called a Cootie. It has a body, head, two antennae, two eyes, one tongue and six legs. Think Mr. Potatohead in bug form. Each of the six items is assigned a number, in this case 1=body, 2=head, 3=antennae, 4=eyes, 5=tongue and 6=legs. Now, you’re thinking how can this be given a context within a game. We sat down in groups of four, and in the layout of the apartment, table 1 was in the kitchen, tables 2 and 3 were in the dining room and 4 through 7 were in the living room.

In your table of four, the player directly across from you is your partner for that round. The object is to build (in our case draw) as many COOTIES as you could in a given timeframe. The kicker is that the COOTIES could only be created in a certain order. To do anything, the body had to be built, or a 1 rolled. At that point, you could start building legs (6) or the head (2). Only when the head was created could the antennae, eyes and tongue be created. Inevitably, most every game came down to the rolling of 6’s to create those legs, which finished off a COOTIE. Once a team finished it’s first COOTIE, it embarked on building a second or third within the given round.

At the end of the round, the pair that had the most COOTIES, or parts of, was the winner. The winning person in each pair then got to choose an item from within the bag of the player on their left. To replace that item, the winner got to give any item from within their bag to that player from whose bag they just received. The winning pair then moved up to the next table closer to table 1. You see table 1 had special powers. Every round ended when a pair at table 1 finished ONE COOTIE. The four people at table 1 could start playing anytime because only when they finished, did the round finish for the other 8 groups. As I learned later, the four people in the kitchen (location of table 1) took their time getting started by going to the bathroom, grabbing another drink, socializing or whatever. The world was their oyster. One indignity, however, was that the losing pair of table 1, was in the subsequent round, assigned (banished as Scott would later call it) to play at table 7.

At the start of a new round, you found yourself either staying at the same table with the your partner of the previous round or moving up with your winning partner of the previous round. The rule was that you could not play with the same partner for two consecutive rounds. This, by the way, sounds like it could be a great icebreaker kind of game.

There were 10 rounds played in the course of the evening. Scott and I both started at table 3. Scott promptly won and moved up to table 1, where he stayed for four consecutive rounds. Alas, he lost in round 9 and ended up at the of the 10th round, his COOTIE ego bruised, at table 7. I lost 9 consecutive rounds of COOTIE. It happened over and over where a pair who had won at table 4 would come up, the pair would take their seats at table 3 and I would tell the person across from that they had unfortunately picked the wrong partner. Inevitably our pair would lose, even in the face of sure victory. My partner would then play the next round with a new partner and they would win and move up. Did I mention that I lost 9 consecutive times? Only in the 10th round did I finally win. But since no 11th round was played, I never, ever, moved from my seat.

Mathematically, since we are going to assume the rolling of die is a random phenomenon, the probability of my losing (or winning) a round is 50%, or .5. My probability of losing 9 times in 9 tries can be calculated as (.5)^9 (.5 multiplied by itself 9 times) which come out to 1/512 = .00195 = .195%. People, that’s essentially two-tenths of one-percent. In the face of continued defeat, I’m finding silver lining in the fact that something so rare could have happened to me.

However, one must wonder at what I ended with in my bag given that I gave away the “good” items in my bag early on. After the fifth round, the winners were pretty disappointed when they looked through my bag. I left with a colorful toy sunflower (which was the best of the five), a can of cat food (salt in the wounds since not only do I not have a cat but that it was expired), condoms, the pickling juice and an old CD case in which there was a half-used bottle of "Oder-eaters". I consider myself luck as after the last round I was able to unload an old used laptop battery. The battery would have been the ultimate insult as it is technically hazardous waste and would have required a special trip to dispose of it in an environmental safe manner.

The night was a classic example of something so simple being so fun.