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Old 09-17-2005, 11:57 PM
AaronBrown AaronBrown is offline
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: New York
Posts: 505
Default Re: chances of flush vs flush

Nothing stupid, it's a tricky subject.

When you pick two items out of one set, you divide by 2, because you can do them in either order. When you pick one item from set one and one item from set two, you don't divide by two because they are distinguishable.

I know is seems odd, but it's true. If you want to pick two cards out of the deck, and you don't care about the order, there are 52*51/2 combinations. But if you pick one red card and one black card, there are 26*26 combinations, no need to divide by 2.
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