beating the odds

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom describing the achievement of a positive outcome that statistical probability would have predicted was unlikely — succeeding against circumstances that the balance of probabilities suggested would lead to failure; the phrase draws on gambling and probability theory, where the odds summarise the ratio of unfavourable to favourable outcomes, and beating the odds means overcoming a situation where the probability was stacked against you; in medicine and epidemiology the phrase is used to describe patients who survive diseases with poor prognoses, populations that achieve health outcomes better than their risk profiles would predict, or individuals who avoid expected harms despite high statistical risk; the phrase carries positive connotations of resilience, exceptional individual effort, and the inherent limits of population statistics in predicting individual outcomes — recognising that even when the population risk is high, some individuals will not be among those who experience the adverse outcome

Examples

• She beat the odds — diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, she remained in complete remission five years later.
• The intervention helped low-income children beat the odds and achieve educational outcomes comparable to their wealthier peers.