[jules101]

And how common is it to get one hand where THREE players each hold a NINE card suit?

This one came up today!

---

Have you ever seen that before?

[uday]

What was the context? Main bridge club, or tournament? Some tournaments use pre-loaded deals, often Goulash ( deliberately wild) deals

[jules101]

uday, on 2012-August-30, 15:09, said:

What was the context? Main bridge club, or tournament? Some tournaments use pre-loaded deals, often Goulash ( deliberately wild) deals

A standard club tournament.

Our dealing machine is away for its annual service, so a small team of us used an "automatic card shuffler" to shuffle all the boards thoroughly. We dealt the boards by hand.

It was - or it seemed to me - such an amazing deal that I recorded it after play was finished.

[helene_t]

The number of hands that contain a 9-card (say) spade suit is 13!39!/(9!4!^2 35!). The total number of hands is 52!/(13!39!). The probability of getting a 9-card suit is therefore gamma(14)*gamma(40)*gamma(14)*gamma(40)/gamma(53)/gamma(10)/gamma(5)/gamma(5)/gamma(36). Which is 0.0000926 or roughly one out of 11000. The chance of getting 9 cards in any suit is four times as big so roughly one out of 2700.