Quote Originally Posted by bigedge View Post
In a double deck game, when penetration has reached 52 cards there are 107,632,809,909 possible [A,2,...,J,Q,K] permutations. This is the peak number possible in a double deck game.

Of these, 95% of the most likely permutations are covered by the first 3,110,183,076, or about 2.89% of the total number of possible permutations.

99% are covered by the first 8,071,684,634, or about 7.5%. This means that about 92.5% of all the possible deck compositions present at 52 card penetration are effectively useless at adding any value to analysis. Or, said another way, analysis that considers only the most likely 7.5% of all deck compositions will be quite sufficient in building an effective strategy.

Of course, the number of permutations a 21 player needs to consider is significantly lower than 8,071,684,634, as the player is not concerned about the individual [T,J,Q,K] permutations but only their sum.
I lose focus after 6,000,000.

Think I'll stop sweating the small stuff starting precisely at 6:36:42 this evening