Not everyone has a Rainman-like capacity for facts and figures. If you are looking to start playing Poker or Blackjack a little more competitively then it could be worth brushing up on some basic probabilities.
The graphic published below, courtesy of Betfair Casino, goes through some of the more interesting probabilities and odds that crop up when playing games with a deck of cards.
The odds you need to have in mind when playing will change dramatically depending on what game you’re playing, especially when in the casino, as they will bring multi-deck games into the mix in order to throw off card counters.
Fortunately, the general distribution will stay the same so the maths should still be useful. Perhaps the most amusing is the peculiar probability of getting a Blackjack when in a single deck.
As the odds of getting an Ace are 4/52 and the odds of a ten value card are 16/52, the combined odds work out about 128/2652. Which sounds like an impressively slim amount of the time, even more so when it’s expressed as 0.05. But in terms of occurrence, this means you should see a blackjack 1:20.7 or 1:21 if you round up. So, you should see 21 every 1 in 21!
For more probabilities, we recommend checking out Betfair’s graphic below:
