Monday, October 12, 2026 · Played it? Here's how rare each one really was.
Compare with the group-of-23 question: this is one specific match.
1 in 365 strangers 0.27%
One stranger has one chance to land on your day. This ignores leap days and assumes birthdays are spread evenly.
Fun fact: For even odds that someone shares your birthday, you'd need 253 strangers: 11 times more than the 23 it takes for any two people to match.
Source: Math: 1 ÷ 365
A 5-card poker hand, no draws.
1 in 72,193 hands 0.0014%
36 of the 2,598,960 possible hands are straight flushes below the royal.
Fun fact: It's 9 times more common than a royal flush, and at one hand a minute you'd still wait about 50 days.
Source: Wikipedia: Poker probability
Like the code a bank texts you.
1 in 1,000,000 guesses 0.0001%
Six digits with 10 options each give one million combinations.
Fun fact: Just two more digits than a PIN makes it 100 times harder to guess.
Source: Math: 10⁶ = 1,000,000
A fair coin, 20 flips.
1 in 1,048,576 tries less than 0.0001%
Doubling the flips squares the odds: 1,024 × 1,024.
Fun fact: Just 10 more flips makes it 1,024 times harder. If all 8.3 billion people on Earth tried once, only about 7,900 would pull it off.
Source: Math: 2²⁰ = 1,048,576
Pick 6 numbers from 1 to 42; all 6 must match.
1 in 5,245,786 tickets less than 0.0001%
There are 5,245,786 ways to choose 6 numbers from 42.
Fun fact: Even the smallest pool here takes a ticket a day for about 14,000 years on average.
Source: Math: 42 choose 6 = 5,245,786