52 Cards. How hard can it be?

StayOrGo

Ask any poker player with knowledge of Mathematics, how many possible sequences of cards, there are in a shuffled pack?

They'll probably be proud to tell you straight away " 52! " or in layman's terms factorial 52, which is 52*51*50*49 etc all they way down to 1.

So what number is this? Well it's just over 8.0e+67 which again, to you and I, that's 8 with 67 zeros after it.

8,000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (if I've counted correctly)

Can it really be that big? There's only 52 cards. Well, yes indeed, the above is true.

Now most people know this, or understand it mathematically, but have you ever really thought about just how big that number is?

So I thought, a bit of perspective, may assist.

There are approx 8 billion people in the world. If we gave each person in the world, One hundred thousand, billion, billion attempts to correctly guess the sequence of a shuffled pack of cards, it would be "almost impossible" that anyone, would ever get it right!

One other point, when a site, talks about, say " A billionth hand promotion."

Unless there was a software bug, it would be almost impossible that, from all the sites combined, that the cards have EVER started in the same sequence, over however many years all these sites have been going.

Food for thought. This is perhaps why Poker, in all it's varieties can be so wonderfully complex, and how every hand is certainly unique.

Cheers,

G

RLT16

maybe this is all true, but if you sit on the same table as gaz680 you can garuntee there will be a fullhouse everyhand regardless of the math

CATCH-22

lol