A couple of weeks ago there appeared several reports of an astonishing coincidence. Reports in the Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Mail tell of a game of whist at the village hall at Kineton, Warwickshire. In whist, one deals 52 cards equally between four players. During this particular game, all four players were dealt one entire suit each.

All three reports refer to an analysis by Dr Alexander Mijatovic of Warwick University. It is always difficult to know how much of what is reported is faithful, but the fullest account of his words was given in The Sun:

The chances of this happening are so humongous that it is almost impossible.
The event can only be compared to natural occurrences.
It would be the same as a person having a tiny drop of water and then finding that same drop of water in the Pacific Ocean.
I would question whether the cards were shuffled the correct number of times but if they were, and the people involved are sure they were, then it is probably safe to say this is the first time this hand has ever been dealt in the history of the game.

It is this last sentence, in particular, that caught my eye: “it is probably safe to say this is the first time this hand has ever been dealt in the history of the game”. I took a quick look on Google News, which indexes old newspapers. I obeyed the following rules: I ignored results when only one perfect hand was dealt (hardly remarkable at all!); I didn’t pick a second result from the same decade (although there were plenty, particularly in the 1920s and 30s) and I didn’t spend very long at all on this. Here are a set of articles I found:

• The Evening Independent – Nov 27, 1929: Four Perfect Bridge Hands Held On The Same Deal In London Game
• The Montreal Gazette – Mar 15, 1935: Perfect Bridge Hands: Four of Them at One Table Break Up Party
• Toledo Blade – Jul 17, 1949: Perfect Bridge Hand Is Dealt At Party
• The Vancouver Sun – Mar 13, 1954: 4 Perfect Bridge Hands Dealt Simultaneously
• The Press-Courier – Apr 5, 1963: Four perfect bridge hands reported second time in less than a week
• The Milwaukee Journal – Jan 25, 1978: A Magnificent 4 in Bridge World
• BBC News – January 27, 1998 Card trick defies the odds

I was particularly taken with an account by Catherine Ford in The Calgary Herald of 29th November 1983, which contains,

Every bridge player fantasizes about the perfect hand – being dealt the 13 cards of one suit – and the perfect game, in which each of the four players receives all 13 cards of one suit. The odds of this happening are 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,559,999 to 1, which explains why a plain brown envelope, sealed in 1946, is among my mother’s prized possessions. It contains the cards which dealt one perfect suit to each player.

William Hartson, commenting in The Independent on one such incident in 1998, said:

There are about six billion people in the world. If they all played one hand of cards every five minutes, 12 hours a day, such a coincidence would happen about once every ten trillion years. On the other hand, there are a good few practical jokers around who would love to sneak a doctored pack of cards to four unsuspecting players to create the perfect whist hands when dealt. I know which possibility my money is on.

It is tempting to suggest that someone made these stories up, or stacked the deck as a joke. However, it turns out these assumptions aren’t needed to explain what is happening.

Essentially, Dr Mijatovic was right to question whether the cards were shuffled correctly (so I wonder if this was actually the main thrust of what he said). Basically, whist is a game in which the objective is to stack the deck. A card is played and the other players must follow suit if they can, meaning the cards at the end of the game are particularly well ordered into suits. If the shuffling does not completely randomise the deck (and it often doesn’t) then the probability of a perfect game occurring is increased greatly. There is a good summary of this on the MAA website at Ivars Peterson’s MathTrek.

Samuel Hansen pointed out on the Math/Maths Podcast when we spoke about this that this is still very unlikely and may even be worthy of note in a local newspaper, so we should let people have their fun. He’s right, of course – I am mostly just amused by the claims of just how unlikely this is and the way an event that happens every few years is set up as unlikely to happen during the lifetime of the human race.