Sucker Bets

Your pal and mine, Skinny Dakota, has been by the Grey Labyrinth recently. While he was here, he brought with him six simple sucker bets, that he thought he would share. The idea here is, of course, not to dupe your friends out of a buck (or you'll have a half dozen dollars and six fewer friends, a pretty poor trade). The idea is to challenge yourself to see how each of these sucker bets could be performed while keeping to the letter of the wager:

1. Take an ordinary matchbook of paper matches. You know, the "close cover before striking" kind. Take one match out. Skinny bets he can drop the match from four feet up and have it land on its thin edge in two out of three tries.
2. Take a sheet of paper and a penny. Trace a circle around the penny and with a sharp edge, cut out the circle. Skinny's bottom dollar says he can pass a regular US quarter through the hole you just made without tearing the paper.
3. Take a paper cup and a pair of dice. Grip one die with your thumb and middle finger. Place the cup in the "cup holder" your thumb, finger, and die make. Balance the other die on the first. Now try to catch one die into the cup, then the other, without using anything else. Hard, isn't it? Skinny says he can do it.
4. Skinny says he can make an unboiled egg float to the top of an unboiling pot of water. Bet that he can't?
5. As a challenge for you, Skinny offers this: Take a yard stick and hold it vertically so the tip is about three feet over your head. Staring at the top, spin around ten times fast, then drop the yard stick and step over it. Skinny wagers you can't.
6. And finally, Skinny claims he has a US quarter that will land "heads" the next four times it's flipped. He'll even wager even money on this.