ELI5: Odds of succeeding twice in 10 tries.

You should be a little more specific with your wording. Does winning 3 times count as winning twice or are you looking to win exactly twice?

If the wording should be winning at least twice, it's usually easier to find the opposite probably: what's the chance of losing 10 or 9 times?

Chance of losing 10 times = 101-0.005

Chance of losing 9 times = 91-0.005 * 10.005

but because you can lose in the first try, second try, third try.... 9th try or 10th try (basically 10 different scenarios where you lose once and win 9 times) you have to multiply the chance of losing 9 times by the number of scenarios that could happen (10).

So now we know the chances of you losing 10 times, the chance of you losing 9 times (10 different ways), and because we want to know the chance of either one OR the other happening, we just add those probabilities together. I emphasized 'OR' because that's a really good indicator that you'll have to add probabilities. If you see an "AND" it usually means you'll have to multiply probabilities.

So in total the chance of you losing 9 or 10 times =

101-0.005 + 10*91-0.005 * 10.005

But we don't actually care about that probability, we care about the reverse. So simply subtract the result above from 1

1- (101-0.005 + 10*91-0.005 * 10.005)

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread