Win Your Seat to the €200,000 GTD International Poker Open

There's a bet a poker sponsor can make that looks quite generous and is, in fact, pretty much safe.

Put a million dollars on the table. Tell every player at the biggest final table of the year that the money is theirs, all they have to do is flop a royal flush. No entry fee, no catch. Get the rarest hand in poker, dealt to you exactly right, caught on camera.

That's more or less what happened at the WPT® World Championship in 2014. And to understand why a company would lay down seven figures on a single hand, we have to know how rare that hand is.

Let's begin with the number doing the work: the odds of a specific player flopping a royal flush are about 1 in 649,740. That's roughly 0.00015%, a coin you'd have to flip and hit heads roughly twenty times in a row.

To flop a royal, two things have to happen in sequence.

First, you have to receive the right two cards. A royal is only made from ten, jack, queen, king and ace, all the same suit. Get your two hole cards from that group, with matching suits. Think something like the king and queen of diamonds. That alone happens about 1 in 33 times, or roughly 3% of your hands.

Then the flop has to complete the picture. You have two of the five royal cards. Now, the board has to bring the exact other three, in that same suit, with no substitutions. The exact three. The chance of those three specific cards landing on the flop is about 1 in 19,600.

Put the two together and you land at 1 in 649,740. There's a neat fact hiding in that figure, too: it's the same odds of being dealt a complete royal flush in five-card poker. Makes sense. Why? In both cases you're asking the deck for the very same five cards.

An important distinction is the one between flopping and making a royal.

Flopping a royal means all five cards are there on the flop. Making a royal means it comes together at any point by the river, using any of your seven cards, the two in your hand plus all five on the board.

Given that extra room, making a royal by the river is far more common: about 1 in 30,940.

Still rare enough that most players will go a lifetime without one, but roughly 21 times more likely than flopping it. To note, that sponsor we mentioned before didn't offer a million for a royal. It offered a million for a flopped royal, the kind that's twenty-one times less likely.

How rare is that in human terms?

Poker legend Daniel Negreanu made his first-ever royal flush at the WPT® World Championship Super High Roller in 2011. He completed it on the turn against Erik Seidel rather than flopping it. He said as much at the table: it was his first one, ever. And even that one wasn't flopped. If a royal of any kind can make a player like that stop and mark the moment, the flopped one is the holy grail.

Season 12 WPT® World Championship, Borgata, April 2014. The sponsor Great Shot Golf puts up $1,000,000 for any player at the final table who flops a royal flush. The offer runs live, promoted as the final table played out. One-time, one bonus, at the 2014 final table.

The tournament had already crowned a millionaire, champ Keven Stammen, who took home $1,350,000. The royal-flush bonus stacked another seven-figure outcome on top. It was a second, wilder path to a million that had nothing to do with outplaying anyone. Only you had to be lucky, 1 in 649,740 lucky.

And from the sponsor's side, it's a nice move.

The stage is enormous, a million dollars on one hand, while the actual risk of paying out is close to nothing. A promotion like this always generates a story (or at the very least people talking). It spotlights the holy grail of hands and ties their brand to it.

That near-impossibility isn't only a bug in the offer.

The honest answer is the interesting one: there's no public record of that $1,000,000 ever being claimed. No confirmed report of a player flopping the royal and collecting. Not surprising given the odds.

The closest royal moment on a WPT® stage remains Negreanu's in 2011. It was a genuine royal flush at the World Championship, and a memorable one.

For the first royal of his career, he didn't flop it. Rather, the hand came together across later streets. So it stands as a testament to how rarely even elite players see a royal at all.

That's the frame to hold onto. When something is a genuine long shot, "nobody has done it" isn't a gap in the story.