Bad beat

Remember the nice new car I was so excited about not too long ago? Jackass in an old pickup truck wasn't paying attention on the highway and slammed into it. A line of cars stopped for some unknown reason. Everybody managed to stop safely except for him. After he pushed me forward, I very nearly hit the car in front of me, but fortunately had left j-u-s-t enough room not to.

Submit your guesses in the comments as to what the final repair bill will be. Closest (over or under, not Price Is Right rules) wins--I don't know what.

PokerNews article #36

Does your opponent have that flush? Here's how to tell.

http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/does-your-opponent-have-a-flush-here-s-how-to-tell-19578.htm

Probability puzzle

This has nothing to do with poker directly, but this week's Sunday Puzzle on NPR is an interesting exercise of your probability-thinking muscles.

Next week's challenge: The following challenge is based on a puzzle from a Martin Gardner book, that may not be well-known. Out of a regular grade school classroom, two students are chosen at random. Both happen to have blue eyes. If the odds are exactly 50-50 that two randomly chosen students in the class will have blue eyes: How many students are in the class?

I got the answer, but it was really difficult. I ended up having to set up a spreadsheet to automatically calculate the number of ways to select two children from a classroom of n students. This allowed me to play with both the number of students and the number of those that have blue eyes, until I found the combination that worked. 

Maybe there's a simpler, more intuitive way of getting at the answer, instead of using brute force the way I did--but if so, it escaped me. I predict that they will have very, very few correct answers submitted.