Article about "three royals in a row."
Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 12:31 pm
Except it's not really three royals in a row. And i could be wrong but I think the math in this article is not correct Take the odds of three royals in a row and divide by number of hands? That doesn't seem right to me to figure out the odds of getting 3 royals in 1000 hands. I guess closer to 1 in 400,000 than 64 billion. Also, he won $2500 on 3 royals? How did he burn $500 on the other hands so quickly? Maybe 2 royals on quarters, 1 on dimes, and some other wins? Or, not max bet. Or he got 3 royals AND bought 600 tacos, which I can understand. But congratulations of course to the guy who got 3 royals in 3 days. [quote]
Three royals in a row astounding
BY JOHN GROCHOWSKI
casinoanswerman@ casinoanswerman.com
December 7, 2011 5:52PM
I don’t really believe in beginner’s luck. The odds don’t change just because you’re a newbie.
Nonetheless, a father’s tale of his son’s first,
second and third times in a casino might make the phrase “beginner’s
luck” ring through your brain at megadecibels. The short version: On his 21st birthday, playing
at Hollywood Casino in Joliet, the son drew a royal flush on a video
poker machine on the first bet he ever made in a casino. That’s roughly a
1 in 40,000 shot, more or less depending on game and strategy. He
played the next day, and drew another royal flush. And he did it again
the next day.
His total winnings, $2,500, aren’t astounding.
Players hit bigger slot jackpots than that every day. But the way he did
it goes beyond uncanny to unbelievable. As a starting point, we need to
look at the odds of hitting three consecutive royal flushes. That would
be 1 in 40,000 times 40,000 x 40,000 and that comes to 1 in 64
trillion.
Next, we need to divide by the number of hands
played. An average player gets in 400 or 500 hands an hour, and a
veteran can play 700, 800 or more. Complicating this is that the new
player was splitting play, alternating hands with his dad, sister and
mother. Days 2 and 3 were very short sessions.
The dad thinks his son played only about 300
hands. I suspect it was more like 1,000. Divide 64 trillion by 300
hands, and it’s a 1 in 213 billion shot. Make it 1,000 hands, and it’s a
mere 1 in 64 billion.
How unlikely is that? Let’s do a table
comparison, and look at Caribbean Stud Poker. The odds of being dealt a
royal flush and winning a big progressive jackpot are 1 in 649,740. If
you played two hours a day, 365 days a year, it’d take nearly 18 years
to play that many hands.
Video poker royals are a lot more common. But
three in the first 1,000 hands are 98,501 times less likely than the
Caribbean Stud royal. It’s a once in hundreds of thousands of lifetimes
shot.
The dad was flabbergasted: “If I hadn’t seen the pictures and the money, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”
John Grochowski is a local free-lance writer. His “Casino Answer Man” tips air at 5:18 p.m. Tuesday-Friday on WLS-AM (890). http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/enter ... story.html[/quote]