I once got dealt a royal flush.

That’s right. A “natural” royal flush. On a quarter video poker machine.

To make matters even more amazing, it was on the first quarter I gambled that day. (Can you imagine if the guy who had been playing that machine for hours just before saw me come over to “his” machine and hit a royal flush on one quarter?)

The probability of being dealt a royal flush is quite low. There are exactly four such hands — one for each of hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds — and there are 52!/(47! * 5!) different poker hands.

[Where does this number come from? Well, the first card has to be one of the 52 cards in the deck. The second has to be one of the 51 remaining, so there are 52*51 ways to get two cards. The third has to be on of the 50 remaining, so there are 52*51*50 ways to get three cards. Using this reasoning, there are 52*51*50*49*48 ways to get dealt five cards. But rearranging the cards doesn’t change what’s in the poker hand — that is, ace of clubs and two of hearts is the same as the two of hearts and the ace of clubs — so we have to divide by the 5*4*3*2*1 ways to arrange the cards.]

So there are 2,598,960 different poker hands, and exactly four of them are royal flushes. This means the odds of being dealt a royal flush are 1 in 649740.

Them’s not very good odds.

Here’s what happened. Several years ago, I was flying somewhere — I believe to Spokane to visit a friend of mine that lives just over the Idaho border in British Columbia. My plane landed in Las Vegas. I had to switch planes, so I got out and went to the gate. I had a good 45 minutes before boarding started, so I thought I would do some gaming. After all, how much can you lose in 45 minutes?!

I selected a quarter video poker machine. I put in my money and hit deal. It dealt out the cards pretty fast, then made the little happy note sound and highlighted the “Royal Flush” payout line. I was a little surprised (to say the least) and not too sure what was going on. It took me a few seconds to realize that I had actually been dealt a royal flush. I held every card (I was once dealt four deuces in a “Deuces wild” game and I was so flustered, I failed to “Keep” any of them, and thus failed to collect my $50), and hit “Draw”. Ta-da! For my one quarter, I won $75.

If I had put in five quarters, I would have won $1000. Yikes!! So of course I immediately started kicking myself for not having put in five quarters. But hey, what can you do.

Yeah, it was cool. But it was also a downer. I had hoped to kill 20 minutes or so. Now what was I supposed to do… keep playing? As a percentage, I was WAY up. And extremely unlikely to change that one way or the other.

I played a few more anticlimactic hands of poker, then cashed out my now $60-some odd dollar draw and went on my way.

It’s great that I got it. But also it’s a bit of a downer — not because I never CAN do it again, but because I probably never WILL do it again. If you play 450365 hands, you have a 50-50 chance of seeing a royal flush. I probably won’t play anywhere near that number, so I have much less than a 50% chance.

Of course, that’s just being DEALT a royal flush. The odds that it will happen with a draw are much higher, but it’s harder to calculate because it depends upon your strategy. Nevertheless, since I don’t play poker that much, I think it reasonably prudent that I don’t expect to see a royal flush ever again.

But that’s okay. I got mine.

In preparation for a Rubik’s Cube contest at an 80s party I went to last week, I picked up the puzzle and have been studying and playing around with it a bit lately.

I happened to be in Hungary in the summer of 1980, shortly after the cube was invented by Ernö Rubik, and several months before it became popular in North America. Someone gave me an article in Hungarian about how to solve it. I can’t read Hungarian, but it included a bunch of photos and some “patterns” — that is, series of moves that tweak a small number of “cubies” without disturbing anything else. With these patterns and a little initiative, I taught myself to solve it.

With practice, I could solve it pretty reliable in 90-120 seconds. That’s where I am now. My algorithm is quite simple: first, solve one side. This step does not use any patterns besides one that I devised myself. Each of the following steps does use patterns: place the corners, orient the corners, place the edges, orient the edges.

Three of the four patterns were extracted from that mysterious magazine article, but the forth, which orients the edges, I replaced with a pattern a friend of mine showed me. He called it “Rubik’s maneuver”, so who knows, maybe it was discovered by Rubik himself.

Although 90 seconds is okay, it’s definitely not world class. The real pros can solve it in less than 30 seconds consistently. Maybe less than 20. I’ve look at this site which has a different method of solving the cube that does not do one side first. There are some interesting ideas here I’m going to explore further.

(Oh, by the way, the contest was canceled… they forgot to bring the cubes.)

Radio station 104.9 is back!

At the end of 2005, the radio station at 104.9 suddenly and violently changed format from mildly alternative to Spanish. In a swoop, one of my favourite and commonly punched-up presets in my car became obsolete.

Of course, my habit of cycling through radio stations to find something good playing right this second (a habit that my sister shares, although I am a rank beginner compared to her) included this old favourite stop for quite some time after the changeover. And me. I’m so dumb. I would stop on this station and lean forward, listening hard. Like in five minutes I’m going to “figure out” Spanish.

Eventually I removed the preset from the list. Acceptance. And closure.

But it’s back, baby! As stated on a concise bulletin on MySpace (thanks Krysti!), 104.9 is now back to its old format, which I would describe as “very much like 105.3 except slightly softer”.

Spread the word. And enjoy the reincarnation of an old friend.