As any Texas Hold’em pro will tell you, it’s a very bad feeling when you say the magic words “all in”… and your opponent flips over his pocket aces to make four-of-a-kind.
Or at least, so I hear.
I wouldn’t know from personal experience, because on this particular instance, I was the guy holding the royal flush.
In any given seven-card hand, the probability of a four of a kind is 0.17%, of a straight flush, .027%. As for the probability of four aces versus a royal flush, this is left as an exercise for the writer, when he is not as sleepy as he is right now.
I got a royal flush once, playing seven card stud, with two of the relevant cards (the jack and queen) face-down so nobody thought it was even remotely possible that I had it; I don’t remember what the next highest hand in play was, but it wasn’t anything near that exciting. That four-of-a-kind vs royal-flush scenario is straight out of the movies — literally. That’s how Mel Gibson’s _Maverick_ ends (though I forget what the four-of-a-kind that the bad guy stacked for himself was; I think some lowish number; they were playing five card draw, so no shared cards, and four-of-a-kind is already way more improbable than it is out of seven).
OMG, your life is now a scene from Casino Royale. (I forget if it plays out exactly like this. However, it’s something similarly improbable. The plot necessity that James Bond must eventually win the power tournament detracts from the shock though.)
That’s *exactly* what I thought — it was like a scene from a movie. In Movie Poker, the showdown always involves an impossibly good hand beating another impossibly good hand, provoking eye-rolling from anyone who’s played even a little poker. (Presumably the audience wouldn’t be impressed by, say, a straight beating a lower straight on the river.)
Unfortunately in this case, the stakes of the game weren’t One Hundred Meeellion dollars, or Reclaiming the Woman I Love, or Saving the World from International Terrorism. It was over a Ten Dollar Buy In Pot. In other words, I don’t think Hollywood will be knocking down my door over this one.
Wow, nice hand. I’ve played a lot of poker, and have never drawn either hand.
Of course at 1 in 10,000 odds, you’d rather get the royal when a ‘bond girl’ is at the table.
Thanks, mmcclellan. I’ve been with my weekly poker group seven years, and playing Texas Hold’em exclusively for four. I *think* during the last four years we’ve seen one or two straight flushes, but my memory is fuzzy.
It would have been nice if there was a Bond girl there. Though rest assured, when Phil and I turned over our cards, *nobody* in the room was exhibiting any cool, suave, Bond-girl-impressing behavior, least of all me. 🙂
You said, “Booyah”, didn’tcha?
Followed by an arm pump and clearly enunciated “Oh yeah, read em and weep.”
I figured that’s what Bond would have done, so…
It’s about time we got the picture and you blogged about this. If I have to suffer a loss when holding four aces, I want it documented, dammit!
I hope to win my money back from you soon.
BTW, I’m not sleepy, so:
Given Evan’s numbers above, and ignoring the community aspect of Hold’em, the probability of both is about 3.5 x 10 ^ -7. So literally less than 1 in a million. I have no idea how close this value is to the real likelyhood.
Just to prove I’ve seen Maverick too many times, the low hand in the final hand was 4 eights, followed by a low straight flush, with Maverick holding a Royal flush in Spades. The odds of this occurring (disregarding a stacked deck) in 5-card draw are about the same as being struck by lightening and hit by a meteor while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel . . .
. . . and living to tell about it.