Could ESPN gets its facts right this week?

My last installment in this series was just a few days ago, because I was late in the week getting to the WSOP broadcast. I'm a little more on top of it this week.

You can see above the first ESPN "Poker Fact." Let's see whether it's correct.

There are ten different ranks of straights, from A-5 through 10-A. Each of them is obviously made of five cards of different ranks, each of which could be any of four suits. So for each straight there are 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 1024 different ways of making the straight. However, four of those combinations--the ones that are all of the same suit--will actually make a straight flush, and one can't legitimately call that just a "straight." So we have to subtract 4 from 1024, leaving 1020. 1020 different combinations of cards that can make up each straight, and ten different straights, means that there are 1020 x 10 = 10,200 different straights!

No problem for the first fact of the night. Let's cross our fingers and hope ESPN can keep it up.





This one is entirely straightforward. I'll again assume we're talking about hold'em here.

You get the first card. Now there are 51 cards left in the deck, of which 12 are of the same suit as the card you're holding. So the probability of the second hole card matching the suit of the first one is 12/51 = 0.235, or 23.5%.

Hooray! ESPN got two out of two right!

You think maybe somebody has tipped them off to this series of posts, and they decided to work a little harder at fact-checking? I doubt it.