What Are the Odds of Getting Royal Flush?
Every poker player, does not matter is they are a professional or a newbie, has had his/her fingers crossed at least once in their life when having a chance of getting a Royal Flush. We have all experienced this moment of sensation; one of the primary reasons it is so strong is that the chances to actually get it are extremely little.
What is Royal Flush?
Let us begin by clearing up the most important detail: What is Royal Flush? In order to have a flush in your hands, all 5 cards must be of the same unit or suit. And as it also comes to royalty, you might have already guessed that these five cards should be 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace. This is how you get royal flush and as there are only four suits (hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades) in the deck there are four chances of having this specific combination.
What is left is to find out how many possible outcomes are there in the whole game and then use simple probability formula. First of all, we should agree upon several details like the way we are playing poker or the number of cards in the deck. Let us take a standard deck of 52 cards from which player is dealt five cards which he/she must keep; there are no wild cards.
What we need to know…
In order to find out the probability of getting Royal Flush we only need 2 numbers. We have already mentioned that we should know the number of ways that the highest ranked hand in poker can be dealt and the answer to that is 4. Secondly, we should calculate the overall amount of probable poker hands.
Let’s get to the figures!
So, if you want to find out the number of total outcomes out of 52 card deck combinations should be involved. What we need to remember is that every hand is a combination of 5 cards and that the dealing order of the cards does not matter. This way we can use a simple formula using which we can easily find out the total number of possible hands in poker: C(52,5)=2,598,960.
And the answer is…
All that is left to do is to carry out easy division. Hence, the chance of being dealt a Royal Flush is only 4/2,598,960 or 0.00015%. Now, it should be clearer why there are so many thrills around the possibility of holding Royal Flush during any Poker game.
