[quote=The Beeb]Four amazed card players were each dealt identical 13-card hands at odds of 61 billion to one.
They each had a run of cards from ace through to 10, plus a jack, queen and king.
The friends had been playing a game called Crush at Brynamman Industrial Club near Ammanford in Carmarthenshire.
They contacted Cardiff School of Mathematics to find out the odds - and lecturer Rhyd Lewis calculated they were 61,204,166,001 to one.
Owen Williams, Meirion Hopkins, Ieuan Griffiths and Mike Harwood were so amazed by the cards they had been dealt, they called over other club members to witness the four hands.
"I was just amazed when I sorted my cards and realised what I had," said Mr Williams, 63, a commercial finance broker.
"It was the first deal of the evening and I was the first one to finish sorting my cards. A run through takes the kitty - so I thought I'd won £1.65."
He soon realised they each had an identical mixed-suit run.
Mr Owen said the group had been playing with a "well-used pack of cards which were cut and shuffled in the normal way".
"If you wanted to get this outcome on purpose I would have thought that it would be impossible," he said.
Maths lecturer Mr Lewis said the probability of the hands occurring in a single deal was 0.000000000016339.
"In other words the odds are around one in 61,204,166,001," he said.
"Given that the odds of winning the lottery are around 1 in 16 million, this demonstrates that it is a very unlikely event."
He said an identical deal should happen somewhere in the world about once every year.
The calculation is based on an estimate of 10 million people playing cards around the world every day, with each game requiring 10 deals.[/quote]
[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8470841.stm]Source[/url]
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauce]Sauce[/url]
Dayumn
Riveting.
Yahtzee
Not that amazing, considering more than 61 billion hands of cards have been dealt in human history.
It was of course the Higgs boson causing more strangeness in the world to prevent its own creation.
Higgs boson :argh:
It's nothing special. Any combination of hands in a single game has a chance of 1 to a few billion to occur.
You could go shitballs over any hand.
[QUOTE=SweetSwifter;19758824]It's nothing special. Any combination of hands in a single game has a chance of 1 to a few billion to occur.
You could go shitballs over any hand.[/QUOTE]
I know what you mean, but you're not really that stupid, are you? It's not just the likelihood, it's the actual coincidence of the fact that they're identical.
This is a good example that just because it's 61,204,166,001 to 1 that somewhere, sometime, that 1 is going to exist. It's not impossible.
[QUOTE=Zeke129;19758490]Not that amazing, considering more than 61 billion hands of cards have been dealt in human history.[/QUOTE]
That doesn't make it any more likely to get that hand.
Improbability drive, WE MUST MAKE IT!
:10bux: they forgot to shuffle.
wait crap
Go fish.
Title confused me and made me think someone won a card game with a 61 billion to 1 payoff. Some lucky fucker that would have been.
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