Seeing Red!

[SixOfWands]

I picked up the hand below and according to the bridge calculator a hand with no black cards is picked up 17 in a million hands.

This means that if you play a duplicate a day every day of your life from the day you were born you would have to live to be 114 to expect to receive one of these hands.

http://rpbridge.net/cgi-bin/xsh1.pl

[hv=pc=n&n=shakt976532dq972c]133|100[/hv]

[LBengtsson]

I picked up the hand below and according to the bridge calculator a hand with no black cards is picked up 17 in a million hands.

This means that if you play a duplicate a day every day of your life from the day you were born you would have to live to be 114 to expect to receive one of these hands.

http://rpbridge.net/cgi-bin/xsh1.pl

[hv=pc=n&n=shakt976532dq972c]133|100[/hv]

 

Yes, 1 in 17,000,000 is long odds, but many lotteries have higher odds and are won all the time. The probabilities are only a guide: they do not tell you when you will pick up this hand.

[smerriman]

I think you miscalculated something somewhere - the probability of having no black cards is 1 in 61055.

 

Edit - nope, it was me that misread, I thought you said 1 in 17 million, you said 17 in a million (which is a rather odd way of expressing it, and it's closer to 16, but hey).

 

Still, most bridge players would play considerably more than (1 hand a day for life) hands - when you include the fact you'd probably be just as surprised with any two voids, that brings it up to 1 in 10000.

 

If you play a couple of sessions a day, you'll see one of those at your table every couple of months.

 

So definitely rare, but not as rare as it sounds. But definitely cool when it happens :)

[pescetom]

And how did you bid it?

[AL78]

Yes, 1 in 17,000,000 is long odds, but many lotteries have higher odds and are won all the time. The probabilities are only a guide: they do not tell you when you will pick up this hand.

 

Can't really compare the odds of any one of the millions of lottery participants winning with the odds of a simgle player picking up a bridge hand with zero black cards. The former is massively more likely than the latter because, in the UK for example, the odds of a lottery win are (when they had 49 numbers) about 1 in 14 million, but there are a lot more than 14 million tickets sold, so the odds of one of those tickets hitting the jackpot is quite high, as the fact that in the UK, the lottery has made over 6000 millionaires since 1994 can testify. Similarly, you only need 23 people in a group for there to be an over 50% chance two of them share the same birthday, even though for an individual, the odds of them sharing a birthday with any other random selected individual are very low (1/365).