But, if you recall the way that we derived the Poisson distribution,... we started with the binomial distribution and took the limit as n approached infinity. So, it seems reasonable then that the Poisson p.m.f. would serve as a reasonable approximation to the binomial p.m.f. when your n is large (and therefore, p is small). Let's calculate P(X ≤ 3) using the Poisson distribution and see how close we get. Well, the probability of success was defined to be: