The Improbable Dream: Consecutive Royal Flushes
As an avid poker fan, I occasionally indulge in imagining hitting the ultimate jackpot – consecutive royal flushes. Though the odds sit at around 1 in 957 million, exploring this poker curiosity can reveal fascinating insights. In this article, we‘ll break down the math, psychology and backstories around double royals.
Defining This Rarest of Hands
First, a quick refresher. A royal flush contains the ace, king, queen, jack and ten of a single suit. With 4 suits in the deck, there are only 4 possible royal flushes in Hold‘em or Stud.
Landing even one royal flush equates to an off-the-charts poker euphoria. Your odds sit around 1 in 650,000 hands according to advanced game theory statistics. But two in a row? We enter the realm of the profoundly improbable.
Crunching the Numbers
To calculate the odds, we multiply the probability of each individual royal flush.
- Odds of first royal flush: 1/649,740
- Odds of second royal flush in next hand: Also 1/649,740
- Combined probability:
(1/649,740) x (1/649,740) = 1 in 957 billion
To put it in perspective, your odds of a Mega Millions jackpot are roughly 1 in 300 million. So hitting double royals is over 3000 times more unlikely!
Even so, let‘s crunch some more numbers around poker‘s rarest occurences:
| Hand | Odds |
|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 1 in 649,740 |
| 4-of-a-Kind | 1 in 4,165 |
| Full House | 1 in 694 |
| Flush | 1 in 508 |
| Straight | 1 in 255 |
While flushes and straights occur much more frequently, royals retain a special aura. But enough math – let‘s explore some backstories of famous double royal hands…
Legendary Tales of Double Royals
Despite the improbable odds, poker history does contain verified accounts of back-to-back royal flushes:
- In 2007, Alex Kostritsyn lucked into double royals playing online at PokerStars
- Back in the 80‘s, according to what I‘ve read, Mick Cohn famously hit double royals at Vegas‘ now-defunct Dunes Casino
Online or live, pulling this off even once puts you instantly into poker legend lore. It represents the supreme poker feat – a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of outrageous fortune.
Other closely-related holy grails include…
Three-of-a-Kind Royals: Poker‘s Holy Grail
Hitting three royal flushes consecutively ventures into the realm of the mathematically impossible. While unconfirmed urban legends circulate about three-royal coups, no definitive evidence has surfaced.
Yet hitting three different royal flushes in a single tournament constitutes poker‘s undisputed holy grail. Only a handful of players hold legitimate claims to this virtually impossible achievement…
In 2022 alone, Phil Hellmuth famously hit three royals en route to a record-extending 16th WSOP bracelet. Michael Beal also remarkably struck three royals in that same 2022 Series.
Among the game‘s top stars, only Negreanu and Ivey can also lay claim to this singular feat. For perspective, not even ubiquitious WSOP champ Phil Hellmuth managed it until age 57…
Will Live Tournament History Unfold?
So could consecutive royals occur on poker‘s biggest televised stages?
Mathematically, it remains in the realm of possibilities over a large enough sample. If every one of the ~100,000 WSOP annual entrants played 75 hands per day for a full month, you‘d expect to see a double royal once every 80 years or so.
Yet as the royals-per-hands density increases on deeper Main Event runs, perhaps we inch closer to history striking on the grandest scale. Despite the odds hovering around a billion-to-one, maybe Phil Hellmuth has spoiled us into naively expecting anything remains possible!
Conclusion
While the probability of consecutive royals may verge on statistical impossibility, I hold out hope of witnessing this poker miracle someday. Even if the odds sit at 957 million-to-one, we must remember that every hand represents a new shuffle of the deck.
And with mushrooming tournament participation, if my math is right, then history should unfold before our eyes sooner or later! Surely someone in the next decade will luck into consecutive cards of a singular suit, all in royal succession…
So keep dreaming big, poker friends! Never stop shooting for the astronomical scores only poker can deliver. It may reside deep in fantasy territory, but nothing fully prepares you for the possibility of lightning striking twice in succession!
