Fate deals card friends 61 billion-to-one fluke

Each member of the group had a run of cards from an ace through to the 10, completed with a jack, queen, king flourish.

The unlikely event happened as Owen Williams, Meirion Hopkins, Ieuan Griffiths and Mike Harwood sat down to play a game called Crush at Brynamman Industrial Club near Ammanford, South Wales.

They were so intrigued by the outcome that they called Cardiff School of Mathematics to find out what the odds were.

Lecturer Rhyd Lewis astonished them further by calculating the chance of the identical straight run hands at a breathtaking 61,204,166,001 to one.

Mr Lewis said: "Given that the odds of winning the lottery are around one in 16 million, this demonstrates that it is a very unlikely event."

Mr Owen said the group had been playing with a "well-used pack of cards which were cut and shuffled in the normal way".