Rare Blackjack at the Cal

Friday - Day 14

Flushiepants doesn't do things by halves when it comes to long trips, as you can see. If I am going to go through terrible flight stresses, taxi rides corning on two wheels, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, I'm going to make it worth my while. So I hit the two week mark. Tomorrow, it's time to go home.

And I'm ready.

I missed seeing a cousin by hours at the start of the trip - they took off as I was landing. And strangely, I'll miss seeing Dr. Raoul Shiboubou, World Famous Penguin Rancher by about 15 minutes. He'll be landing as I'm pushing back.

But one thing that worked out is a chance to meet Casey.

Casey holds a special place in my heart as the number one donator to Jimmy Poon's monochrome monitor upgrade fund. He's forked over hard-earned cash four or five times over the last couple of years, and he's coming into town later in the day. The plan is to meet for dinner - that's why I talked to my host about a comp for two at Redwood.

But that's a ways away and I fire up the Little Giant and have some in-room cheapo joe. I am really ready to go home, and I could happily leave for the airport right now. However, there's a day in Vegas ahead of me, and I won't squander a minute of it. I finish packing for the move to the Cal, get an Uber, and I'm there without incident.

I'm down to my last $100 in cash. I'm down about $400 on the trip, and the rest of the cash I brought has gone to strippers expenses. I message the Quad Queen that I have a $100 bill and five quarters, but I need enough cash to tip so I can eat.

I gamble the $100 bill, make five bucks, and bail. So the server gets tipped for breakfast.

It's a kind of quiet day, I just sort of poke around at things a bit, trying to see if I can win some bankroll. I manage to stay even, and then I buy in at blackjack.

Two hours goes by and I lose $50, but the most incredible, amazing thing happens. Something that will probably never be repeated, at least, while I'm sitting at the table.

It's a two-deck pitch game, and four of us are playing.

The dealer deals and it's one, two, three, four - four blackjacks. Nobody around including the pit boss has ever seen this before, and I sneak a photo of it. I just had to, didn't I?!

When I posted the live updates a while ago, I took a quick mental bash at what the odds on this were, and basically made up a number that I thought was pretty outrageous. It turns out I was way out in left field.

Thanks to tringlomane on Vegas Message Board, we have the true odds of this happening on a double deck game. It's 1 in 447, 277.

That's ten times as rare as getting a Royal Flush, roughly.

How do you figure this out? Well, there are 8 Aces in the decks, and 32 face cards, and 104 cards in the deck. The odds of getting the first blackjack is 8/104 (for the Aces) times 32/103 (for the face cards) times 2 (because they can be in one of two positions).

Shorthand for this is 8/104 x 32/103 x 2. For the three remaining blackjacks, the number of available Aces drops by one per hand, and  the number of available cards drops by two per hand. So, here's what we have:

Hand 1: 8/104 x 32/103 x 2
Hand 2: 7/102 x 31/101 x 2
Hand 3: 6/100 x 30/99 x 2
Hand 4: 5/98 x 29/97 x 2

The overall probability of this happening is Hand 1 x Hand 2 x Hand 3 x Hand 4.

I feel incredibly lucky. But I don't even get a hat out of it - there's no bonus on the books for blackjacks all around, other than getting paid 3:2 for your bet.

I poke around at some BEEEFFFAAALOOOOOOOOOOO!!! and eat a chicken lunch. It's teriyaki and looks good on the plate, and tastes pretty good too. I don't finish, because I'm saving room for comped Redwood Steakhouse with Casey.

I play a bit of Keno and an interesting pattern comes up. It's a little unusual - but this kind of thing is the reason that I throw my money away play clusters of numbers on Keno.

I get a ping from Casey - he's landed at the airport (a good place to land) and is headed downtown very soon. I look forward to meeting him and showing him the Cal's Steakhouse that I love so much.