History Main / MillionToOneChance

* In ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'', the odds of success were calculated to be 0%. Not 0% as in "so close to zero it might as well be zero", but ''flat-out impossible''. [[BeyondTheImpossible The heroes make it a habit to defy the odds and succeed anyway]]. The main character also declares that if the odds of success are "nearly 0%", they might as well be 100%.

* Subverted in ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica''; Kyubey implies to Kyouko that [[spoiler:it's theoretically possible to make witch!Sayaka human again, but extremely unlikely that it would work. Kyouko tries it anyway...and fails, because there's no indication that it is possible either. There's just no evidence that it isn't.]]

* At some point in ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' the reader may sit back and think, "Hey, wait a second. Yeerks are a race with insanely superior weapons. Not only that, but anyone can be a Controller. And this is a worldwide invasion. The heroes are six teenagers who live in a small town in California that can turn into animals? How can they stop the invasion? A bunch of animals couldn't beat the U.S. Army, never mind the Yeerks." This is lampshaded many, many times throughout the series, as the kids admit that at best all they do is slow down the Yeerks from time to time. They mostly lose battles and they agree that they'll never really be able to beat the Yeerks. They do eventually win, due in large part to the morphing technology being so dangerous and versatile. Rachel sums it up pretty well during David's betrayal when the kids are reflecting on how hard it is to kill an Animorph:

** In the Hitchhiker's guide universe, most probabilities are distinct (ie rarely do two highly improbable events have the same probability) which is why it's possible to specify the event you want to occur using a finite/infinite improbability drive. You induce all events with that probability, but usually there's only one or the side-effects of the others are trivial or at least benign. What's even more mindboggling is that the probability that a particularly notable improbable event will have a probability whose digits are particularly notable [[spoiler: such as Ford and Arthur being rescued / 1 over 2 to the phone number of the party where Arthur first met Trillian]] is itself a number which can be plugged into the drive.

* ''Literature/{{Worm}}'': the audience has known for a while that a "world-ending" event is coming. The heroes have spent years doing everything they can to avert it, but a precognitive parahuman keeps noting an increasingly lower chance of preventing it. When the critical moment comes, the last estimation she gives is a mere 3% chance of stopping the end of the world. What happens? [[spoiler:The heroes ''fail''. They do not hit that 3%. A few days later somewhere around 15 billion people are dead (the cataclysm hit multiple parallel realities, not just the Earth the characters live on).]]

** In the sequel, a player once again insists on being allowed to attempt something that would require a NaturalTwenty for success. [[CriticalFailure He rolls a one.]]

* ''ZeroTimeDilemma'' has a scenarioputs several main characters in a room in which the "puzzle" is that they will soon be killed by automated machine guns unless they roll 6-6-6 on a set of three dice on the first try. One out of 216 isn't quite as unlikely as one in a million, but it's still pretty bad. So what do you do? [[spoiler: There is no AdventureGameLogic solution to the puzzle. You just have to roll the dice; the characters will indeed get killed the first time you try, but if you replay the scene, you end up in the timeline where they roll 666 and survive by sheer luck.]]

** ''Literature/EqualRites'', the third book in the series, is the first one to state that "one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten", because of [[TheoryOfNarrativeCausality narrativium]]

* Spoofed in ''Series/RedDwarf'' with the luck virus. Lister, Cat, and Kryten travel to a certain planet to investigate the death of a bacteriologist. While there, Lister is injected with the virus, which allows him to pick all the aces out of a deck of cards. He also tries to hit a dartboard's bullseye while throwing over his shoulder, but the virus wears off and he instead hits the center of Kryten's forehead. In the climax of the episode, [[spoiler:Rimmer goes insane and locks the three in quarantine, slowly draining out the oxygen. Due to the virus however, Lister successfully guesses the code to unlock the door, then manages to trip over the necessary components to cure the insanity while running backwards down a hallway.]]

* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' story "The Creature from the Pit", the Doctor's companion Romana tells him that the odds are 74,384,338 to 1 against his CrazyEnoughToWork plan actually working. He tells her that 74,384,338 is his lucky number. (The plan works, of course.)

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'': [[TheCaptain Captain]] [[TheKirk James T. Kirk]] is a master at this - [[TheSpock Spock]] repeatedly [[IfMyCalculationsAreCorrect computes]] incredibly long odds for a successful execution of whatever Kirk's latest daring plan is, often citing denominators in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and Kirk ''almost'' always wins. Eventually, they start [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this.
** In "The Naked Time", they have to implode the anti-matter engines to prevent themselves from crashing into a planet that is itself imploding. The procedure has never been done before: Spock and Scotty have only minutes to prep the engines, and they only have one shot to get it right. Kirk insists, "We've got to take that 10,000 to 1 chance!" They do. It works.
** A rare ''aversion'' is in "Errand of Mercy". Kirk decides to break into the Klingon headquarters and kidnap the commander. Spock calculates very long odds against success. They get as far as the commander's office--and are captured.[[note]]Because the Klingon Empire is a PoliceState, everyone--including the commander--is under constant surveillance. The commander's {{Monologuing}} is actually playing for time until Klingon security arrives.[[/note]] Kirk and Spock are only saved by the Organian DeusExMachina.
** An inversion of sorts occurs in "Devil in the Dark", when Spock calculates extremely low odds that both he and Kirk would be killed by the MonsterOfTheWeek, and (unsurprisingly) neither one dies. (Spock's point is raised after Kirk suggests he stay out of the hunt for the monster — ostensibly for his own safety, but really out of concern about Spock's science-minded pacifistic approach.)

* Of course, John Cena is far from the worst offender of invoking this trope. Wrestling/HulkHogan in WCW was doing this to such a degree that C-3PO's head would explode trying to calculate the odds. The 1996 Uncensored PPV had Hulk Hogan team up with his then buddy Wrestling/RandySavage to take on the Alliance to End Hulkamania. Wrestling/RicFlair, Wrestling/ArnAnderson, Wrestling/{{Meng}}, Wrestling/TheBarbarian, Wrestling/LexLuger, Wrestling/KevinSullivan, Z-Gangsta (Zeus), and The Ultimate Solution. That's right, an 8 on 2 advantage, [[InSpace in a triple-decker steel cage]]! [[spoiler: Hogan wins.]]

* Experiments with the Zoolinef drug in ''FanFic/ManehattansLoneGuardian'', prior to being used on an actual pony, gave every indication that it would work without fail. [[spoiler:Juniper Leaf later admits that they didn't account for the one-in-a-million chance that it would fail, resulting in Gray's mind being tampered with instead of her body]].

* The odds might be better than a million to one in this example, but in the tournament finals of ''[[Fanfic/YuGiOhTheThousandYearDoor Yu-Gi-Oh The Thousand Year Door Redux]], both Drake and Kyle are in a no-win situation. It became obvious days ago that this was NotJustATournament, and whoever wins the duel between them will duel one of the Queen's three {{Designated Victim}}s, a situation which, judging by what happened in the first three duels of the semi-finals, will be bad for whoever wins their duel, and worse for whoever the winner duels next. But Kyle does have an idea, although he doesn't have much time to explain it to Drake:

* In ''Series/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', Arthur and Ford are rescued by the Heart of Gold seconds before they would have died after being ejected from a Vogon ship. Arthur states that the chances against it were astronomical after Ford tries to act as if he was counting on it as a certainty. Because Arthur had lived his entire life on Earth and Ford had been stuck there for over a decade, the ensuing weirdness such as an infinite number of penguins with a revised script for ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'' didn't tip them off to the fact that they had an advantage in the form of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Portal 2}}'', [[EnemyMine GLaDOS]] gives this evaluation of the player character's chances of winning the final battle:

** A recurring theme in TheVerse. In ''[[VisualNovel/UminekoWhenTheyCry Umineko No Naku Koro Ni]]'', Kinzo relies on a huge gamble involving the epitaph to [[spoiler:give Yasu the headship and get them to forgive him]] as evidenced by the quote on top of the chapel: "You will only be blessed at a probability of a quadrillion to one." In the same EP, Bernkastel tells Lion and Will that the chances of Lion existing in a fragment is about 1 out of 2,578,917. [[spoiler:And later on, cruelly reveals that in all those fragments, Beatrice/Lion suffers the same dead-end fate.]] [[{{Determinator}} Not that it stopped either Will or Lion.]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* Subverted in a chapter of ''Manga/FrankenFran''. A BornLucky serial killer [[spoiler: dies to the astronomically high odds of being struck by lightning]].

* ''WesternAnimation/TheAdventuresOfTintin'':

* In ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive'', Arthur is quick to [[https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2018-02-02 point out]] that a million-to-one chance isn't low enough when there are seven billion people on earth.

* In ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive'', Arthur is quick to point out that a million-to-one chance isn't low enough when there are seven billion people on earth.

-->'''Tintin:''' Bad news, Captain. We've only got one bullet.
-->'''Haddock:''' And what's the good news?
-->'''Tintin:''' [[BadassBoast We've got ONE]] [[ImprobableAimingSkills bullet.]]

-->"Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!"\\

* ''Anime/DigimonSavers'': The entire time the heroes are fighting [[BigBad Yggdrasil]], the Computer God of the Digital World, it constantly calculates their chances of winning. "You're chances of winning are exceedingly close to zero." "I calculate a 0.000001% change of you succeeding." And so forth.

* The premise of ''Manga/DetectiveConan'' lies in the Million To One Chance that a poisonous pill would shrink him into a 6-year-old body instead of killing him. Fortunately for him the creator of the drug was the other person to shrink, so that she could help him.

:: Of course, it happens by the end of the book.

* During a 2021 Fortune Cookie stream, Creator/ProtonJon rolled the same game twice in a row (with a safeguard message noting how lucky that was to roll the same game in a ''regular'' cookie poll). This has happened before, but it was when Jon had a fraction of the games he does now (which is still a rather large collection).

** Finding and catching a [[VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver shiny Koffing]].[[note]]Finding a Shiny Pokémon in general is a 1 in 8,192 chance. Catching it is even less likely.[[/note]]

* In ''WebAnimation/IfTheEmperorHadATextToSpeechDevice Special 6: Tabletop Adventures'', the characters play a TabletopRoleplayingGame. Naturally, the {{Player Characters}} go OffTheRails, ending up in a battle against a way-too-powerful enemy called the Gorger-Lord. One of them tries to attack him, but the GameMaster informs him that the Gorger-Lord has a Toughness of 70 -- meaning he ignores that much damage from every attack. Since the player character's attack only does damage based on the throw of a ten-sided die plus three, there's no way he can harm the Gorger-Lord. Except, of course, that when you throw a 10, you can throw again for more damage. Still, it would take getting a 10 seven times in a row to get more than 70 damage. Though it's not pointed out by numbers, the possibility of that happening is one out of ten multiplied by one out of ten etc. seven times -- one out of 10,000,000. So naturally he rolls a 10 eleven times (chance one in 100,000,000,000).

* In ''WebAnimation/IfTheEmperorHadATextToSpeechDevice Special 6: Tabletop Adventures'', the characters play a TabletopRoleplayingGame. Naturally, the {{Player Characters}} go OffTheRails, ending up in a battle against a way-too-powerful enemy called the Gorger-Lord. One of them tries to attack him, but the GameMaster informs him that the Gorger-Lord has a Toughness of 70 -- meaning he ignores that much damage from every attack. Since the player character's attack only does damage based on the throw of a ten-sided die plus three, there's no way he can harm the Gorger-Lord. Except, of course, that when you throw a 10, you can throw again for more damage. Still, it would take getting a 10 seven times in a row to get more than 70 damage. The possibility of that happening is one out of ten multiplied by one out of ten etc. seven times -- one out of 10,000,000. So naturally he rolls a 10 eleven times (chance one in 100,000,000,000).