WILL WARD

Calculating the probability of a full house is shown in chapter 1 of Harvard's Stat 110 (Probability) course, and is pretty straightforward. First, get the number of ways to choose three of a kind, multiply it by the number of ways to choose a pair from the remaining cards, and divide that product by the total number of possible hands. The calculation is shown below. which gives ~0.00144. A small probability, as you'd expect for such a powerful poker hand. Binomial coefficient calculations are done using the binomial coefficient formula: Now, let's look at the example of calculating the probability of holding a single pair if dealt a 5-card poker hand. There are 13 ranks in a deck of…

Here's an experimental verification of the theoretical probability given in the last post: Poker Hand Probabilities: One Pair

I received some more bookstore gift certificates, so I went ahead and picked up a copy of the second edition of Data Science From Scratch by Joel Grus. Apparently, it gives the beginner a chance to jump into data science without going right to the big libraries Pandas and scikit-learn, so I figured it was worth the money and the time since I'm a first-principles kind of guy. Data Science From Scratch