Wow hand April 16, 2007
Posted by dorigo in games, personal.trackback
The strongest bridge hand I was ever dealt:
6NT were a breeze. I will now try to estimate the chances of getting 28 points or more, as in the hand above. Hmmm or maybe I will search the web… Will update. Right now, I estimate a 1 in 3000 chance, roughly.
UPDATE: It is actually a mere 19 times in a million, according to http://www.himbuv.com/pce.htm . I had estimated 1 in 3000 based on the number of hands I had ever played in my life: big mistake! The place I play in is www.pogo.com, where I suspect some algorithm is at work to give the occasional strange hand more chances to happen than normal. This, at least, is a good working hypothesis, which would explain the odd hand above and others (where oddities were different from the high-card-point count).
Re-Update: I did the computation myself ( see the next post). I find a probability of 2.9 times in a hundred thousand.
Are you playing for money?
No, for fun… Only game I play for money is poker… Rarely, and never online!
Cheers,
T.
Please! I rely on odds tables because i have not taken the time to learn the math, but you lavck such an excuse. Intuitively, I believe your number to be incorrect, but i will leave it to others to check the math.
[...] Posted by dorigo in mathematics, personal, games. trackback Many thanks to Riqie Arneberg, who criticized me for blindly trusting some information on a web site about the odds of picking up 13 cards in a [...]
Tommaso,
Speaking of math, there is an article on network theory in the latest from Plus Magazine http://www.plus.maths.org/issue42/index.html which will give you added input into whether you will decide to conduct another blog site. A previous item, two weeks past, deals with mathematician Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan’s fundamental contributions to probability theory which relates to this post.