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Old 01-07-2005, 04:35 PM
MortalWombatDotCom MortalWombatDotCom is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
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Default Re: Did I win this bet?

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the fact that the original poster used this formula without explaining how or why he derived it (and i suspect someone else derived it and he just saw the end product) doesn't make him wrong.

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As far as how I derived it, I am proud to say that I came up with that sloppy formula on my own. I can't really say why I thought it would work. It just intuitively made sense to me (whether it makes sense to others is another matter) and when I plugged in a 9 out flush draw it ended up with the answer I knew was correct beforehand. So I figured I had it right.

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well, if i were your probability instructor and you provided this as an answer on an exam, i would take off points, maybe all of them. personally, i think if you are going to memorize one of the aforementioned formulae, yours has the benefit of being the easiest to get close enough to correct in ones head at a poker table. it doesn't give any insight into how one would, for example, compute the odds of making a flush in a hold-em like game with an extra card on the end, whereas the other approaches mentioned in this thread extend more or less intuitively into variations of that nature. YMMV.
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