Dead Man’s Hand

A few days ago, I posted about the repeating digits that had been occurring in the Amazon sales rank of Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. For three days in a row, a repeating digit occurred three times in the sales rank each day.

The story continues.

On August 1, it happened again… but something cooler happened, too. The sales rank of MJ4MF on August 1 was 88,111. Though sad in regards to book sales, it’s numerically fantastic! Not only does it contain a digit that repeats three times (1), the other digit (8) repeats twice, and — hold on to your hat! — the repeated digits 8 and 1 occurred on the date 8/1!

Does it get any cooler than that?

Well, maybe. It might have been a little cooler if the rank were 8,111, which would match the full date 8/1/11.

But 88,111 could also be thought to represent a “Dead Man’s Hand” in poker. Officially, a Dead Man’s Hand contains a pair of aces and a pair of eights, but many sources also use the term to refer to a full house with aces over eights.

What did the geometrician say when someone took his playing cards?
Decagon.

This reminds me of a poker game that I played with an engineer and a statistician. In the middle of the second hand, the police raided the game. An officer asked the engineer, “Were you gambling?”

The engineer replied, “No, officer, I was not gambling.”

The officer then asked the statistician, “What about you?”

The statistician replied, “No, officer, I was not gambling, either.”

Finally, the officer turned to me. “Were you gambling?” he asked.

I replied, “By myself?”