Gaming Mathematics - Combinations

Combinations

Games of chance are also good examples of combinations, permutations and arrangements, which are met at every step: combinations of cards in a player’s hand, on the table or expected in any card game; combinations of numbers when rolling several dice once; combinations of numbers in lottery and bingo; combinations of symbols in slots; permutations and arrangements in a race to be bet on, and the like. Combinatorial calculus is an important part of gambling probability applications. In games of chance, most of the gambling probability calculus in which we use the classical definition of probability reverts to counting combinations. The gaming events can be identified with sets, which often are sets of combinations. Thus, we can identify an event with a combination.

For example, in a five draw poker game, the event at least one player holds a four of a kind formation can be identified with the set of all combinations of (xxxxy) type, where x and y are distinct values of cards. This set has 13C(4,4)(52-4)=624 combinations. Possible combinations are (3♠ 3♣ 3♥ 3♦ J♣) or (7♠ 7♣ 7♥ 7♦ 2♣). These can be identified with elementary events that the event to be measured consists of.

Read more about this topic:  Gaming Mathematics

Famous quotes containing the word combinations:

    “...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It’s not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don’t write very differently from white men.”
    —Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

    “The wider the range of possibilities we offer children, the more intense will be their motivations and the richer their experiences. We must widen the range of topics and goals, the types of situations we offer and their degree of structure, the kinds and combinations of resources and materials, and the possible interactions with things, peers, and adults.”
    —Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994)

    “I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity—it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind.”
    —Norman Mailer (b. 1923)