If we examine the poker example further: a poker hand can be described as a 5-combination of cards from a 52-card deck.

The order in most lottery draws does not matter. Combinations come up a lot when you need to estimate the number of possible connections or groupings between things or people.Ĭalculating combinations is useful in games of chance like lottery, poker, bingo, and other types of gambling or games in which you need to know your chance of success or failure (odds), which is usually expressed as a ratio between the number of combinations in play that will result in you winning divided by the number of possible combinations that will result in your losing.įor example, the odds of winning the US Powerball lottery jackpot are about 1 in 292 million (1/292,201,338) where 292,201,338 is total number of possible combinations. The order in which you combine them doesn't matter, as you will buy the two you selected anyways. For example, if you want a new laptop, a new smartphone and a new suit, but you can only afford two of them, there are three possible combinations to choose from: laptop + smartphone, smartphone + suit, and laptop + suit. Formula for possible combinations with repetitionĪ combination is a way to select a part of a collection, or a set of things in which the order does not matter and it is exactly these cases in which our combination calculator can help you.

Permutations calculator