Author: Bob Dancer

I hit a $2 NSU Deuces Wild royal recently — from left to right Q♣ K♣ A♣ T♣ J♣. It’s not an unusual royal in any respect. It was a one card draw with the queen coming in as desired.

The next day, 22 clock hours later but only four hours of video poker play, I hit a $1 9/6 Jacks or Better royal in the exact same Q♣ K♣ A♣ T♣ J♣ order. This time I needed to draw both the queen and the ace to collect.

So, I asked myself the same question that I’ve received from others so many times: How rare is this? I suggest you come up with a number before we continue.

I’m omitting the fact that the two royals required a different number of cards to be drawn — although, frankly, if they had matched there too, I’d have included that into the mix. The tradition in these exercises is to add in any and everything you can to make your event more unique than a similar situation. If you can make your event be 1-in-2,000,000, that’s twice as good as being only a mere 1-in-1,000,000.

I’m omitting the fact that it was two royals in only four hours of play. Calling it two royals in four hours starts the clock when I hit the first royal. It was also two royals in 76 hours of play. But it was about a tenth of a royal cycle before I hit the second one and you have about a 1-in-11 chance of connecting on something in a tenth of a cycle.

And I’m limiting the discussion to single line games. For all who have been dealt four-to-the-royal on Triple Play through Hundred Play and connected on more than one royal, all those royals on the same deal were alike. It can happen drawing to three-of-fewer-to-the-royal as well, but that’s not so common.

The number I get is that there is a 1-in-480 chance that your next royal be in the same suit-and-rank order as the last one you got. One way to figure this out is you have a 1-in-4 chance to be the same suit. Once the suit is determined, you have a 1-in-5 chance (queen in this case) for the first card to be in the correct position. Then 1-in-4, 1-in-3, and 1-in-2 for the next three cards. Once those have been determined, the last card is predetermined. Multiplying all of those out, you get 1-in-480.

Which isn’t that rare. Even if I multiply it by 11 because the second one happened in one-tenth of a cycle. Frequently in video poker we can come up with shots that are more than 1-in-1,000,000. This doesn’t come close to that.

Over a lifetime, it figures that a lot of us will do this. I don’t know exactly how many single-line royal flushes I’ve had, but it’s probably 400-500 or so (and probably three times that many on multi-line machines) and there are only 480 different ways for a royal to be. It’s very possible I’ve done this previously and not realized it.

I don’t have photographs of most of my royals and even if I remember that I hit two diamond royals four days apart, I wouldn’t be sure of the order of the cards. It’s just not something that makes a big impression on me. 

But this time, since I happened to take pictures (Bonnie still gets a kick out of them and asked me why I sent the same picture twice), I saw them side-by-side and noticed they were the same order.

I created this article immediately after I hit the second royal described above. Nine days later I hit another single-line royal, also in clubs, with the cards in the same order — sort of. If you shift all of the cards two positions to the right (or three to the left), using some sort of wrap-around feature, the cards are in the same order.

I’m not going to attempt to figure out how likely this was for a next royal. It’s not an exact match, and there are a variety of different ways that an inexact match could be similar.

Still, I think it’s curious and interesting.