Example: A Poker Hand
The game of poker has many variants. Common to all is the fact that players get - one way or another - hands of five cards each. The hands are compared according to a predetermined ranking system. Below, we shall evaluate probabilities of several hand combinations.
Poker uses the standard deck of 52 cards. There are
The probability of whichever hand is naturally 1/2598960. [Mazur, pp. 81-82] shows another elegant way of arriving at the same probability. Imagine having a urn with 52 balls, of which 5 are black and the remaining white. You are to draw 5 balls out of the urn. What is the probability that all 5 balls drawn are black?
The probability that the first ball is black is 5/52. Assuming that the first ball was black, the probability that the second is also black is 4/51. Assuming that the first two balls are black, the probability that the third is black is 3/50, ... The fifth ball is black with the probability of 1/48, provided the first 4 balls were all black. The probability of drawing 5 black balls is the product:
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The highest ranking poker hand is a Royal Flush - a sequence of cards of the same suit starting with 10, e.g., 10♣J♣Q♣K♣A♣. There are 4 of them, one for each of the four suits. Thus the probability of getting a royal flush is 4/2598960 = 1/649740. The probability of getting a royal flush of, say, spades ♠, is of course 1/2598960.
Any sequence of 5 cards of the same suit is a straight flush ranked by the highest card in the sequence. A straight flush may start with any of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 cards and some times with an Ace where it is thought to have the rank of 1. So there are 9 (or 10) possibilities of getting a straight flush of a given suit and 36 (or 40) possibilities of getting any straight flush.
Five cards of the same suit - not necessarily in sequence - is a flush. There are 13 cards in a suit and
Four of a kind is a hand, like 5♣5♠5♦5♥K♠, with four cards of the same rank and one extra, unmatched card. There are 13 combinations of 4 equally ranked cards each of which can complete a hand with any of the remaining 48 cards. Giving the total of 13×48 = 624 possible "four of a kind" combinations.
A hand with 3 cards of one rank and 2 cards of a different rank is known as Full House. For a given rank, there are
A straight hand is a straight flush without "flush", so to speak. The card must be in sequence but not necessarily of the same suit. If the ace is allowed to start a hand, there are 40 ways to choose the first card and then, we need to account that the remaining 4 cards could be of any of the 4 suits, giving the total of
Three of a kind is a hand, like 5♣5♠5♦7♥K♠, where three cards have the same rank while the remaining 2 differ in rank between themselves and the first three. There are
There remain Two pair and One pair combinations that are left as an exercise.
References

- What Is Probability?
- Intuitive Probability
- Probability Problems
- Sample Spaces and Random Variables
- Probabilities
- Example: A Poker Hand
- Bernoulli Trials
- Binomial Distribution
- Proofreading Example
- Conditional Probability
- Dependent and Independent Events
- Algebra of Random Variables
- Expectation
- Probability Generating Functions
- Probability of Two Integers Being Coprime
- Random Walks
- Probabilistic Method
- Probability Paradoxes
- Symmetry Principle in Probability
- Non-transitive Dice

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