Does anyone know the probability of picking the £100,000 and £250,000 in consecutive boxes? (I've just done two Maths exams and can't be bothered to do even more to try and work it out, especially when I'll probably be wrong anyway.) It seems to have happened an awful lot lately.

Hmmm... If I can work it out correctly, it's 19!/20!, which equals 0.05.

1/22 and then a 1/21 chance, which is 1/43? Oh dear.. my mathematics fails me again.

Thanks guys! Odd how often it's happened lately - in the past month I can remember it happening to Dot, Massimo, Patrick, Gary, Sarah (:(), Raj and now Jason.

It depends how many boxes are left at the time, for a start.

There are 231 different pairs of positions that these two boxes could be opened in - e.g. 1st and 2nd, 5th and 9th, 7th and 18th... for example.

To take them out in successive boxes during a game it means they have to be opened 1st/2nd, 2nd/3rd, 3rd/4th, ..., or 19th/20th. So there are 19 such pairs (not counting 21st and 22nd because once you get to the last two you're not really "picking" those boxes, just seeing what was in your own box and the other one left at the end) .

So the chances of taking them out in successive boxes, at some stage during the game, is 19/231, or about 1 game in every 12. Not that unlikely at all really.

Oh! Thank you! So the recent abundance of it isn't as odd as I thought it was.