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Drawing card pairs until the deck is cleared

Question

A deck of 20 cards contains two cards of each value from 1 to 10. Each turn you draw two cards at random from what remains; if they have the same value they are discarded, otherwise both go back into the deck. You continue until the deck is empty. What is the expected number of turns?

Short answer

100100. With kk pairs left, a turn succeeds when the second card matches the first, probability 12k−1\tfrac{1}{2k-1}, so the wait averages 2k−12k-1 turns. Summing over k=1,…,10k=1,\dots,10 gives ∑(2k−1)=102\sum(2k-1)=10^2.

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