In a hand of 5 cards, you want 4 of them to be of the same rank, and the fifth can be any of the remaining 48 cards. So if the rank of the 4-of-a-kind is fixed, there are possible hands. To account for any choice of rank, we choose 1 of the 13 possible ranks and multiply this count by
. So there are 624 possible hands containing a 4-of-a-kind. Hence A occurs with probability
There are 4 aces in the deck. If exactly 1 occurs in the hand, the remaining 4 cards can be any of the remaining 48 non-ace cards, contributing possible hands. Exactly 2 aces are drawn in
hands. And so on. This gives a total of
possible hands containing at least 1 ace, and hence B occurs with probability
The product of these probability is approximately 0.000082.
A and B are independent if the probability of both events occurring simultaneously is the same as the above probability, i.e. . This happens if
- the hand has 4 aces and 1 non-ace, or
- the hand has a non-ace 4-of-a-kind and 1 ace
The above "sub-events" are mutually exclusive and share no overlap. There are 48 possible non-aces to choose from, so the first sub-event consists of 48 possible hands. There are 12 non-ace 4-of-a-kinds and 4 choices of ace for the fifth card, so the second sub-event has a total of 12*4 = 48 possible hands. So consists of 96 possible hands, which occurs with probability
and so the events A and B are NOT independent.