Very big numbersI was amazed to see the odds of a golfer scoring two hole-in-ones in one round was calculated at 67,000,000-to-1 by America's Golf Digest. Some self-confessed hacker from Spokane, Washington, USA did it at Liberty Golf Course earlier in the week. Says the article...

Varallo, who has never broken 90, called his two aces "the two best shots I'll ever hit." At 31, he said, he's reached the pinnacle of his athletic career.

Honestly, you'd have to set your heights higher, surely? Three in a round man! A golfing hat-trick! It reminded me of Julian Barnes final chapter in his History of the World in 10½ Chapters, in which a man, dead and gone to heaven, spends several hundred years (perhaps longer) of his eternal afterlife getting his golf game down to a perfect and consistent 18 strokes.

Anyway, what really interested me was that 67 million figure. If that really is the odds, I imagine this sort of thing is happening all the time. There must be tens of millions of golfers in the USA alone. Hundreds of millions around the world. Almost certainly there would also be hundreds of millions of rounds of golf being played every week. Hole-in-one doubles must be virtually common-place.

I was reading about the 'Law of Truly Large Numbers' (aka Littlewood's Law) the other day, and had been pretty much won around to the view that million-to-one 'miracles' not only can, but also statistically should, happen pretty regularly to everyone.

So, roll on my golfing hat-trick!

[golf story via Insta Marv]

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