deal or no deal

(Somebody please tell me if I got this wrong)

Last night, I did something I never do -- I watched the entirety of DEAL OR NO DEAL. And it was actually pretty entertaining. Now if you've never seen this gameshow before, I'm not going to go into it now... click on the link if you're interested.

Anyway, they had a guy on who managed to pick the top award (in this instance, it was $3,000,000.00) on his first try -- of course, we didn't find this out until the very, very end, but it was very impressive -- it was a 1 in 27 chance that he'd get that right.

1 in 27. That's pretty amazing.

To add to the drama, the second-to-last case he picked was the VERY LOWEST award (one shiny penny, or $0.01). Now the odds of this happening are also pretty amazing -- but what are the odds that the last two cases would be the highest award and the lowest award? If I've got this figured right, that'd be 1 in 27x26... or:

1 in 702. That's really seriously amazing.

But what were the odds that I'd watch this entire show, and actually come out thinking that Howie Mandel wasn't totally annoying and obnoxious?!

I can't even venture a guess at figuring that one out...