Bridge

WARNING: MATHEMATICAL CONTENT!

As I approach my 'toughest' final of the week (a bridge tournament), I thought I'd share some numbers with you.

A bridge hand consists of 13 cards from a standard 52 card deck. There are 635,013,559,600 hands you can be dealt while playing bridge. You would have to play 24,836,748 hands per day to play every bridge hand over the course of 70 years - that's 287 hands per second.

There are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible hands to be played by the whole table. That amounts to 82,472,935,650,000,000,000 hands a second, played since the earth was created around 4.54 billion years ago.

You have a 566,976 times better chance of being struck by lightning than getting a hand with all of one suit. Surprisingly, you are just slightly more likely to be struck by lightning twice than to get this hand.

You have a .2% chance of having all of the aces, a .00017% chance you'll have all the kings to go along with it, and a .00000000006% chance the queens will join the party. If it is any consolation, you have a 98.7% chance of having at least one of those cards.