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Articles

On Probability & Life’s Little Miracles

Phillip Hoffmann on the importance of the astonishingly improbable.

Above my desk I keep a copy of an article that made the news back in January, 1998. It concerns a game of whist played in Bucklesham, Suffolk, when the hand dealt after the deck had been properly shuffled was perfect, meaning that each of the players (four, including a dummy) had every card in a suit. That is, one player had all the hearts, another all the clubs, and so on. What are the odds of this happening? Glad you asked. It turns out one Horace Norton had already done the math for this back in 1939 and calculated that we should expect this to happen once in every 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,600,000 deals.

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