What are the odds of that? It’s a general question every poker player has asked at one time or another, and for one GGPoker fan this week it was back-to-back Royal Flushes that prompted the question… and the outrageous answer!
Player hits two royal flushes, one hand after the other 👀.
This is a 422,000,000,000/1 chance, on average.
Can you name something else in life with the same odds? pic.twitter.com/fvW5BanI4O
— GGPoker (@GGPoker) October 14, 2024
“Player hits two royal flushes, one hand after the other,” reads the tweet. “This is a 422,000,000,000/1 chance, on average. Can you name something else in life with the same odds?”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a 422 billion-to-1 long shot that just came home – appearing close to one time in half a trillion – and it puts it up there with some of the least likely events to ever happen in the world.
Some of you will already know that the chance of getting one Royal Flush in No Limit Hold’em is a whopping 650,000-1 (or to be exact, 649,739:1). To get two in a row? Simply multiply it by itself and the magical 422 billion appears.
So, those aces you’ve been waiting on all night appear on average every 220 hands (as with any other pair, but we know these aren’t just ‘any pair’!) That means getting them back-to-back is (220 x 220 = 48,400), or roughly a 50,000-1 shot.
Bees, Murders and Sharks
Away from the table, the likelihood of aces appearing back-to-back is the equivalent of dying from a bee sting. That lies somewhere between getting murdered if you live in the USA (18,000:1) and turning your MBA into becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company (135,000:1).
Our Royal Flush scenario, though, is of a different order of magnitude.
If deadly shark attacks happened as often as poker hands were dealt, you’d see 50,000 deaths before your Royal Flush appeared (though slightly less if you don’t live near the coast– the shark attacks, that is!).
Less likely things to happen include:
- Being killed in a plane crash (11,000,000:1)
- Winning the Powerball Lottery (290,000,000:1)
- Dying in a rollercoaster accident (750,000,000:1)
But, of course, there are some things that dwarf even our Royal Flush scenario, and one of them involves cards as well.
Shuffle Up and …seriously?
Have you ever wondered how likely it is to shuffle a deck of cards and have them magically (well, randomly) appear in order?
That works out at a staggering 1 in 8.0658*1067 (yes, that means 67 zeroes at the end – our Royal Flush is just 9 zeros!). There are, in fact, more ways to arrange a deck of cards than atoms in the universe.
(That’s the sort of numbers chess players are more used to – the number of different possible games of chess lasting 40 moves often compared to cosmological maths!).
Speaking of chess, Grandmaster Ben Finegold was one of those to comment on the Royal Flush bonanza, sparking a slew of funnies…
- I guess Aces holding up is less likely? –Ben Finegold
- Me getting laid –DonkeyPoker
- Maybe getting struck by lightning twice? –John Johnmaz
- Mike Postle poker results at Stones –mmapropsguy
Well, for these last two we can give actual numbers! The lightning number is a miserly, and somewhat scary, 11,000,000-1 event whereas the probability that Mike Postle was cheating is, let’s say, WAY higher!
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