With large samples, a chi-squared test (or better yet, a G-test) can be used in this situation. However, the significance value it provides is only an approximation, because the sampling distribution of the test statistic that is calculated is only approximately equal to the theoretical chi-squared distribution. The approximation is inadequate when sample sizes are small, or the data are very unequally distributed among the cells of the table, resulting in the cell counts predicted on the null hypothesis (the “expected values”) being low. The usual rule of thumb for deciding whether the chi-squared approximation is good enough is that the chi-squared test is not suitable when the expected values in any of the cells of a contingency table are below 5, or below 10 when there is only one degree of freedom (this rule is now known to be overly conservative). In fact, for small, sparse, or unbalanced data, the exact and asymptotic "p"-values can be quite different and may lead to opposite conclusions concerning the hypothesis of interest. In contrast the Fisher exact test is, as its name states, exact as long as the experimental procedure keeps the row and column totals fixed, and it can therefore be used regardless of the sample characteristics. It becomes difficult to calculate with large samples or well-balanced tables, but fortunately these are exactly the conditions where the chi-squared test is appropriate.