In the May 2013 elections, the mayoral contest for San Teodoro town in Oriental Mindoro province ended in a tie.

Rival candidates Marvic Feraren and Boyet Py received the same number of votes: 3,236. The Commission on Elections decided to break the tie through a coin toss, which Feraren and Py agreed to.

San Teodoro election officer Reny Pagilagan said at the time that whoever got the most counts of heads in the toss would win as mayor, according to GMA News.

Each flipped the coin five times and got five heads, resulting in another deadlock. A toss tiebreaker followed with Py getting one head in five throws and Feraren with two. The latter was proclaimed mayor, which Py graciously accepted.

Pundits say there is a 50-50 chance of winning in a coin toss, but Frantisek Bartos, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, went out of his way to verify such an assumption.

Bartos assembled a team of researchers to conduct the experiment. They tossed coins and counted how many times it faced upward or showed the face or front side. The researchers found out that the face turned up 50.8 percent of the time.

The researchers took 81 days of tossing 350,757 coins. They suffered sore shoulders that they relieved by using massage guns.

As a consolation for their crazy effort, Bartos and his team recently won an Ig Nobel award in the field of probability. The award was a parody of the Nobel Prize.

“Although it’s a ‘parody’ prize, it is very nice to have your research highlighted,” he told Agence France-Presse. “And hopefully it amuses and maybe even inspires a new generation of scientists.”