View Single Post
  #1  
Old 07-31-2005, 07:07 PM
BruceZ BruceZ is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,636
Default To irchans: your question of 3 years ago answered

This question asked for the number of hands needed before there was a 50% or better probability of seeing all 1326 hold'em hands. At the time I approximated the answer at 10,016 hands. Irchans said that Sklansky posted the answer of 10,019.8 hands on rgp, and asked how to get his answer, but no one could it figure it out. Now using my "new toy" shown to me by Pzhon, we know that the correct answer to the nearest tenth is 10,019.0 hands. And to think that the new toy is just the inclusion-exclusion principle which I have been using all along for other problems. It doesn't give the answer directly, you have to run it over the range of possible values, or use the goal-seek function of Excel to solve this non-linear equation for N. The number of terms also had to be found empirically, as 6 and 7 terms both ensure the result is < 0.5, while decreasing N by a tenth would make both terms > 0.5.

1326*(1325/1326)^N - C(1326,2)*(1324/1326)^N + C(1326,3)*(1323/1326)^N - C(1326,4)*(1322/1326)^N + C(1326,5)*(1321/1326)^N - C(1326,6)*(1320/1326)^N + C(1326,7)*(1319/1326)^N <= 0.5.
Reply With Quote