Posted on 03/12/2017 8:01:22 PM PDT by Swordmaker
My girlfriend, ex-wife, and younger daughter and I were playing cards this afternoon. We were playing double-deck contract pinochle. My daughter shuffled and my ex-wife cut the cards and dealt the first hand. My girlfriend bid and won the contract for the first hand. This is that hand she got, a once in a lifetime pinochle hand:
Meld scoring in this game was handed down from both sets of double grandparents on my side and my ex-wife's side from the two different parts of the mid-west. It does not comport with the Las Vegas meld rules but I have seen it in Hoyle's Rules for Pinochle. The melding score conventions seem to be all over the place for Pinochle and are apparently regional and can be hard to pin down any agreement. For example some written rules claim that Triple Pinochle is only 60 points while others say 90 while the 60 point crowd claim that quadruple is 90, and the 90 point crowd hold out for 300 points for a quadruple Pinochle. Similarly, the rarity of being dealt a triple run in any suit argues for a ten fold increase over a double run, not just for a minor bump in points that some award it. Those who award the triple run a minor bump, award a quadruple runs double the score of a double run, which flies in the face of all rules of probability.
A game in Double-Deck Contract Pinochle is 500 points, with the contracting side winning if both go over. This hand which consists of triple aces around at 1000 points, a run in the Trump suit of diamonds for 15 points, and a Double Pinochle (Queen of Spades, Jack of Diamonds) for 30 points, all totaling 1045 points! The extra trump Queen means nothing except it can be used to trump someone else's Ace when the declarer is out of a suit! First hand of the day, game over, all she wrote. One hand, just the meld was 545 points more than enough to win the game!
In my over 60 years of playing Pinochle I have seen only a couple of hands similar to this although not for as many points. . . that was the last (and best) hand my ex-wife's mother was dealt in her life when at age 95 ½ she was dealt a hand that consisted of a double-run for 150 points, double aces around for 100 points, and a triple pinochle for 90 more points, totaling 340 points! Four days later she died peacefully having never played another hand of cards!
We've had a running joke in our family in the years since then that no one wants to get that good a hand. . . they may not survive the experience!
In my lifetime of Pinochle playing, I have had Triple Kings around. . . that's 800 points. My daughter once had a got a Triple run in hearts. . . I wasn't there for that one. . . but that scores 1500 points in a game of 500.
This hand is almost the equivalent of being dealt a Royal Flush cold. . .
Ex-Wife and Girlfriend ...... Awesome start to the story regardless .....ROTFLMAO !
“My girlfriend, ex-wife, and younger daughter”
Props for this being 3 different individuals, at least.
If you were playing cards with your new girlfriend and your ex-wife, obviously you all were in some altered state of reality that allowed this to happen...
I don’t know squat about pinochle, but that’s a *lot* of Aces.
Occam’s Razor sez: Teach your daughter how to shuffle cards more effectively.
Think of this:
The number of ways a common deck of cards can be arranged is 52! The exclamation mark is mathematical shorthand for “factorial” which means, 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 etc., etc., on up to …….x 52.
For instance 3! = 6 (1 x 2 x 3). There are 6 ways to arrange 3 letters:
ABC
ACB
BAC
BCA
CAB
CBA
4! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 which equals 24 different ways to arrange 4 letters. (Try it!)
52! makes a big number—approximately 8 x 10^67—or 8 with 67 zeroes behind it.
Here’s a way to think about that number:
Start a timer that runs in seconds.
1. Stand at the equator then take one step forward. (One step = 1 foot.)
2. Pause for 1 billion years.
3. Take another step. Pause for 1 billion years.
4. Continue like this until you’ve gone all the way around the earth.
5. Reach down and remove one drop of water from the ocean.
6. Go around the earth again at this pace (one step every billion years). When you get all the way around the earth again, take another drop out of the ocean.
7. Repeat step #6 until the ocean is empty. (About 26 septillion laps)
8. Now, set a sheet of paper on the ground.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.
10. When you’ve repeated steps 1-9 enough times that you have a stack of paper reaching to the moon (about 3.3 trillion repetitions) then start back at #1 again.
Repeat steps 1-10 about 216,000* more times, and your timer will have reached a number equal to 8 x 10^67 seconds.
*216,485 to be exact
Yep. That’s a big number, and a completely useless fact unless, on a moment’s reflection, you realize that if you have
2 pairs of shoes
2 jackets
3 pairs of pants
7 shirts and
7 neckties or scarves
You can wear a different outfit every single day for over 1.6 years!
(2 x 2 x 3 x 7 x 7 = 588)
Numbers I used for this calculation:
Number of card combinations: 52!
Gallons in the ocean: 3.52670*10^20 (from NOAA)
Water drops in a U.S. gallon: 75,708.2 (From online conversion page)
Distance around Earth at equator: 24,902 miles. (From encyclopedia)
Number of days in a year: 365.25
Average distance to the moon: 238,855 miles. (From NASA)
Thickness of a ream of 20 lb. copy paper: 2.25 inches
Thickness of one sheet of copy paper: 2.25/500=0.0045 inches
Occam got shaved quite well this time. My daughter, an experienced card player for her at least 32 of her 38 years, is also the designated shuffler for me and my ex-wife since our thumbs have gotten a bit arthritic. She had shuffled this deck thoroughly, this time for a good seven times!
It has become quite an embarrassment for me that I cannot shuffle a well used deck even once. Damn thumbs. I used to be a pretty good card manipulator. Not no more. It feels like Occam left his damn razor in my Thumb joint. Too damn painful.
Sounds a bit like my explanation of why it is impossible to use brute force to break the 256 bit AES encryption by trying every possible key to Apple's iPhone encryption. . . not when they use a 144 character key made up from a potential pool of 226 possible characters. . . trying 50,000 possible keys per second a super computer, testing to see if you got any sensible results, using a super computer, would only take 5.62195 YEARS to try them all.
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