January Go for GOLD contest

[Ambassador E]

yes it was on this site.so thank you edog

[edog743]

I am surprised

[shadowman]

For those of you who are suspicious, please do the math. WM has provided you with the number of hands played so far so you should be able to tell us the odds of two RFs within 11 hands. Otherwise your speculation sounds a lot like whining.

[edog743]

Just wanting to make sure the contest is legit. I am sure you have no problem with that Shadowman

[Eduardo]

I'd like to see the odds of two royals within the same session, or 100 hands. So here is my best first shot.



 
Odds for one royal in a session I think (using 1/40,000 as the royal odds) are:
1-(39999/40000)^100 = 1 every 400.495 sessions?
 
So maybe you square that for an estimate on happening twice, probably not precise since you can't get two on the same hand, making this an estimate.
 
If so that would be 1 in 160,396 sessions on average. With those odds we should not be surprised at all for it happen once with how many sessions there are in a contest, with a slight chance of it even happening twice (very low chance of 3). If my numbers are anywhere close.  I'm sure it's more complicated than that.
 
I bow to our math experts here for anything more precise and maybe i went about it the wrong way. But at least i made an effort to see if it's "impossible" or actually probable with that many hands.
 
Odds aside I would still like to know what color socks the leader was wearing when they did hit it!

[faygo]

 
 
Odds aside I would still like to know what color socks the leader was wearing when they did hit it!
 
I suspect tinfoil un-mentionables.

[New2vp]

Just wanting to make sure the contest is legit. I am sure you have no problem with that Shadowman Edog, I appreciate your public service intentions.  How do you propose to ensure that the contest is legit?

[New2vp]

Odds for one royal in a session I think (using 1/40,000 as the royal odds) are:
1-(39999/40000)^100 = 1 every 400.495 sessions? 
I bow to our math experts here for anything more precise and maybe i went about it the wrong way. But at least i made an effort to see if it's "impossible" or actually probable with that many hands. I'm not going to do the exact calculation but will give a couple tips to those interested in doing it themselves.  It would be lost anyway on those who have a preconceived notion that things are fixed.  Certainly when there is a large population, someone is going to have an unusually unlikely course of events occur during their game(s)...but apparently not everyone gets that.  Answers to such questions already are always in the contest FAQs to little avail.I wonder why people who think the contests or other results are fixed bother to continue to frequent this site, play in the contests, or even to make posts, but explaining psychological quirks is not one of my fields of expertise.Eduardo, back to your post:  I would suspect that many people play strategies in this contest that would improve the probability of a royal on any one hand from 1/40000 to something higher, maybe closer to 1/30000 and that will have a significant difference over a population of a few hundred thousand.Calculation tips:  Your first calculation is actually the probability of having at least one  royal (one or more royals) in a session rather than exactly one royal.  You determined this correctly by calculating the probability of having zero royals and subtracting it from one.For exactly 1 royal, the probability would be 100 x (1/40000) x (39999/40000)^99.  And you can find the probability of 2 or more royals in 100 hands by:
Pr(2 or more) = 1 - Pr(1 royal) - Pr(0 royals)
For other calculations:The probability of having exactly z royals in 100 hands is 100!/[z!(100-z)!]  x  (1/40000)^z  x  (39999/40000)^(100-z)where 100! = 100 x 99 x 98 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1.  This looks difficult, but a lot of the factors in the numerator of the fraction cancel out the factors in the denominator, so it is not all that hard to do even with a hand calculator.If you want to do this for some other number of hands than n = 100 or some other probability rather than p = 1/40000, the general formula is: n!/[z!(n-z)!]  x  p^z  x  (1-p)^(n-z)Nonetheless, these formulae, nor the calculations therewith, are not likely to prevent cries of "It's fixed," whether the criers have sufficient evidence for their claim or not, but I applaud your efforts to try.Odds aside I would still like to know what color socks the leader was wearing when they did hit it!Delving into what members are wearing in front of a home computer may be a little more information than I'm interested in.

[edog743]

New thats not my job. that would be the great and powerful webmans! who by the way does a great job. although he may be short-sighted on other topics on this forum. thats just my opinion on the subject

[Webman]

We handle these concerns on an case-by-case basis in an effort to continually lay such concerns to rest. It's true that when it takes something with such extremely high odds to win, there will always be skeptics. You could play 400 sessions in this contest and not hit a single royal flush, so it's easy to understand why hitting two in a single session would seem unlikely and frustrating to some. It is unlikely, but the unlikely is what it takes to win.So in a previous contest when it was asked if the winners may have used a program to play a whole bunch of sessions, I posted the number of sessions that the winners had played which showed it to not be the case.When someone questioned whether 2 royals in a single session was possible, the odds demonstrate that it is in fact both possible and expected.We're happy to address any future concerns, but it's always nice when the concern is based on data that it is reasonable to question rather than a hunch that someone got too good of a score, when the data shows that score is actually very likely to happen with a perfectly fair game.Other suspicions in the past have had to do with what time zone a player is in, that gold members have an advantage, and that gold member have a disadvantage, whereas the game program and card selection pay no mind to the location of the player, or the membership status of the player.Every hand is random. I know that is a difficult thing for some to accept.