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ROYAL FLUSH TO THE BOARD - odds against the "IMBERseal" PHENOMENON

edited May 2010 in Sky Poker Live
Many thanks to this week's Sky Poker's Club - and Richard Orford & Tikay for enabling me to relive this surreal moment in my poker history.

I had only been playing poker for a few weeks when this actually happened - and at the time I thought that all hands were selected randomly from a huge database - and therefore would appear again on another table either at the same time or in the future.

I think I now understand ??? that each hand is randomly generated and therefore will never be repeated unlesss the random generator deems it to be so.

It did only dawn on me when there was much publicity about the 250,000,000 hand being due and I happened to notice that the hand numbers were 9 digit numbers in the 240.000,000s (in the words of one of our total Player finalists DOOOOHHHHH!!!)

When I saw THAT hand - and after seeing the replay I realise I actually folded (in my excitement I actually thought I had played) - I quickly jotted down the number and left it on my desk.

I honestly felt that a Royal Flush coming on the BOARD would be a regular occurance - and a feature of on-line poker - but the more I played the more I realised I had been involved in something really special.

I then carried out web research and couldn't find and reference to this particular happening - or the odds involved. I began to unofficially refer to it in general chat as the "Imberseal" Phenomenon" due to giving it my "seal" of approval when considering the crazy odds against me actually witnessing such a hand.

Now it has had TV coverage - is it the first hand of it's kind ever to be broadcast?

Anyway let's talk about odds. We are in agreement that to be dealt a Royal Flush in FIVE card poker is approx 650,000 to 1. I will start the ball rolling and say that if we consider that there were 3 options for the six players to fold (the hole, flop and turn) before we would see the BOARD cards in their entirety - we should make some allowance for that to happen. How many times do we actually see a flop - one game in 7 or 8 I guess - so we could muliply our original 650k x 7.5 and end up with 4,875,000 to 1. By that calculation we should have seen the "Imberseal" on at least 50 occasions in 250,000,000 hands on Sky poker!

Anybody got any more scientific theories or ways of working this thing out more accurately?

*By the way - if the "Imberseal" already has a name I am happy to use the official monika - or if the next person who "claims" one wants to rename it - I won't be offended!




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