Sep 22
Last night the intricate plan that my roommates and I had meticulously devised for the night fell to ruin. Instead of enjoying a 4 or 5-hour marathon session of Scrubs – Season 2, we burned the midnight oil with a gratuitous amount of alcohol. Not to do anything half-assed, I threw myself into the drinking with a zealotous fervor. What exactly happened here, as the annoyingly ubiquitous saying goes, stays here, but this picture was taken somewhere along the way. Use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
During a non-homoerotic period of the night we sat down to play a drinking game which, according to Matt, is named Stick the Dealer. On the surface it is a simple guessing game. However, after last night’s escapade I am fairly certain the game has a deeper darkness known only to the demons and hell-spawn who devised it. You take a deck of cards and assign one person to be the dealer. You then go around in a circle taking turns trying to guess which card is on top of the deck. If you guess wrong the dealer says ‘Higher’ or ‘Lower’ and you guess once more. If that guess is also incorrect then you must drink for as many seconds as the final guess was from the correct answer. (You guess 8, the answer was 10 – drink for 2 seconds. Pretty straightforward.) If, however, the card is guessed correctly then it is the dealer who must drink; 10 seconds if called out on the first try, 5 seconds if on the second.
The game was going quite smoothly until it was my turn to deal. And then, with no warning of any kind, all reason and order fell out of the universe.
The first person to guess nailed the card on their first try. I had to drink for ten seconds. Then the second person guessed, and got the card right on the first try. I had to drink for ten seconds. Then the third person guessed… correctly on the first try. I refused to drink until someone admitted that they were cheating. For the fourth person I didn’t even look at the card until they had made a guess… which turned out to be correct. I shuffled a few times before the fifth person stepped up to the proverbial plate… and guessed correctly once more. And everyone laughed and laughed. Everyone except me, anyway.
A lot of people become belligerent when they drink a lot. It turns out that I can be one of them. Being the unique snowflake you all know me to be, when I get drunk I tend to become belligerent about the more idiosyncratic of subjects. In this case: mathematics. Although I remember the night just fine, I was told this morning that I kept screaming, “But this is statistically impossible!!” over and over. And in fairness, it was. I was a little too dizzy to do the math at that moment, but since then I’ve worked it out. To guess a card on the first try you have a perfectly reasonable 1 in 13 shot (~ 7%). On the second try you have an average of 1 in 6 (~17%). That means the odds of guessing the right card in two educated guesses is right around 1 in 4. No big deal. However, the odds of guessing the correct card on the first guess, twice in a row, are 1 in 169 (~ 0.6%). To do it three times in a row is 1 in 2,197 (~0.04%). Four times in a row is 1 in 28,561 (~0.003%). Five times in a row is a cool 1 in 371,293 (~0.0002%). I don’t want to overreact over a little game of cards, but as drunk as I might ever get, my mind is still capable of recognizing miracles when they happen. Despite my most educated and cogent arguments my roommates still called me a bitch when I tried to point out the insanity of the moment. The world was turned straight upside down and nobody even cared but me.
And the sickest part of it all? After going 5 in a row, the girl who went next missed on both guesses. The next person guessed correctly on their second attempt. And then the table went 4 in a row on a first guess streak once again. What are the odds of that, you ask out of masochistic curiosity? Five in a row, followed by four in a row? Let’s play it cool and just say: zero. What happened to me shouldn’t actually happen. Ever. Not to anyone, anywhere.
I am a walking, breathing, mathematic phenomenon. And probably the coolest one you know.