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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

> but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big

Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.

When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.

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I think that's an important insight because it also plays a large part in many conspiracy theories. Basically if you look hard enough for any kind of statistical oddity you'll always end up finding something somewhere. If you only cherry-pick these data points and ignore the billions of "true negative" correlations it's easy to reach the craziest of conclusions. It's the same idea behind "anecdotes vs. data".

But the coincidence that makes it to the top of HN is when the poker guy wins his third WS using the exact same hand. (At this point he played the hand entirely out of superstition at a negative EV but got insanely lucky. He will eventually lose all his winnings playing that hand again and again for the rest of his life. But they’ll name the hand after him, so maybe it will all have been worth it.)

I'm curious about your WSOP mention - did you single this one out because it (remarkably) did happen before? Or were you speculating it could happen again in the future?

Not aware of it happening before, just a random example.

Interesting! For reference, it did happen once before. In 1976 and 1977, Doyle Brunson won the WSOP with the same hand - 10-2 (a terrible hand), and it's now named after him.

The odds of the same person winning the WSOP now at all are significantly smaller as the fields have grown so much, never mind the compounding of winning it with the same hand twice :)

(To clarify, it was not the exact same hand - different suits in each case. But still pretty remarkable!)

Oh, I was only vaguely aware that he won twice in a row, so I included an additional condition cause I wanted something that didn't happen. But I guess that subconsciously I had the fact that it was the same hand in memory.

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