Poker Dice

The Game Room
1

I found in a drawer today a set of 5 poker dice. I haven’t thought about, or used them for many years. I put them in a cup, shook & dropped them on to the table & got 5 queens “Five of a kind” at first throw. I have looked up the probability of this & it is 6/776 or 1 in 1296 or a percentage of 0.08%,

My first thought was to jump in the car & drive to the casino in Baden-Baden ( about an hour’s drive from here) but unfortunately, like everything else they are closed down at the moment.

I was extremely elated, though I had achieved nothing really. What should I deduce from this?

2

That you and people like you (and me) keep the lights on and the rent paid at those casinos.

3

Firstly if you roll something interesting, you remember it.
If you don’t you swiftly forget it.

This is called Confirmation Bias.

Secondly, having a good result at home has no relation to how you will do at a casino later.

It’s good that you were cheered up by this die roll, since we are all facing troubled times with the current crisis.
If you’d like to do a scientific survey, you could roll your poker dice a lot (say 1,000 times?) and record your results to see if your dice are balanced.

4

[Moderating]

Since this is about a game, let’s move it to the Game Room forum.

5

OK

6

Isn’t that all of it. Even if he had been in a casino playing some game at that very moment the instead of at home the outcome would still be random.

And I do get that same thought sometimes, if the cash register totals up groceries to a round number like $100.00 I might at first think I should go buy a lottery ticket. But based on the two bombs on a plane theory my odds of another unlikely event occurring have been greatly reduced so I’d just be wasting my money to gamble.

7

TriPolar; Yes, I don’t think (unfortunately) that good luck at gambling is accumulative, that’s probably only in the realm of the movies. According to the philosopher Pascal, the odds against getting a similar result on a second throw would be exactly the same as in the first, in this case 1 to 1,296.

8

Maybe I don’t know what poker dice are, but if they are six sided dice and each only has one queen on them, the odds of five queens aren’t 1 in 1296. They’re one in six to the fifth power, which is 1 in 7776.

The odds of any one value coming up five for five (Yahtzee!) is 1 in 1296. But queens specifically is 1 in 7776.

9

I think he was just talking about the odds of rolling five, irrespective of which face it was.

10

Sensibly said - casinos make a LOT of money, so they are not bothered by luck.

I would have called Pascal a mathematician, but he was certainly a talented chap.

11

[quote=“glee, post:10, topic:850761”]

Sensibly said - casinos make a LOT of money, so they are not bothered by luck.

I would have called Pascal a mathematician, but he was certainly a talented chap.
[/QUOTE ]

yes he was a mathematician

12

How would your result translate into future gambling wins?

Is there some sort of invisible luck entity or force which fills certain people? How does it transmit this energy? How does it affect the outcome of physical actions like dice rolls or card shuffling? Is there some sort of test we could devise to quantify luck in people? Is the way that the luck entity grants its power through electromagnetic forces? Strong force? Weak force? Gravity? A totally new force unconceived by physics? How does this luck force know what’s good? That 5 of a kind is good, but that another result is bad? Does it have intelligence? If it’s an invisible, incorporeal force, how does it have intelligence? Does it have a brain?

Is it invisible? Incorporeal? How does it interact with our universe? How does it know what you want?

People that believe that there’s some sort of luck - a luck that influences the universe, not just looking at random results and calling some lucky - never ask themselves these questions even though it’s obvious to me. If one person can be lucky, and another unlucky, wouldn’t you be curious how this could possibly work?

13

I think you are all overlooking the fact that a roll like that is an indication that you are the Chosen One.

14

It’s estimated that approximately 1295 other people tried this today, and failed to get “five of a kind”. Sadly, none chose to report their results on SDMB.

15

My favorite question about Luck as a personal statistic… The premise is usually that some people have more of this Luck than others. So, how did they end up with more Luck? They couldn’t have just “been lucky”, since this would have happened before the personal Luck values were allocated.

16

Well fine, all of you, I’ll make the Teela Brown reference.

I always liked that part of Ringworld. Not that her luck would become an active force, but there in the distribution of the world some people would end up on the right side of a bell curve even throughout their lives. Though distributionally speaking, I’m not sure anyone would live that far right.

17

It’s easy to retrospectively say “he/she was lucky” but there are many other factors involved in personal good luck - fortitude, resolution, hard work etc. though it’s hard to see how these could apply to the throw of dice. One thought is, it could be related to timing; to throw the dice at exactly the right auspicious moment in time & space? (whatever that means! )

18

Nah, resolution and hard work wouldn’t give you “luck” on a die roll. But then, for something like that, you don’t really need much of it. Sure, that die roll looks like long odds… if you look at it in isolation. But how many things do you do each day that you can calculate a probability for? Lots of them. It really doesn’t take very long to accumulate a hundred “die rolls”, or a thousand, or 1,296 of them. Sooner or later, one of them is going to come up “lucky” and do something that looks remarkable. That’s not weird. It’d be weird if it didn’t happen.

19

Getting what you deserve and have earned through hard work, fortitude, and resolution isn’t luck. Luck is about beating the odds within some circumstantial framework.