Each bridge hand receiving exactly one ace
Question
A shuffled -card deck is dealt into four hands of cards each. What is the probability that every hand contains exactly one of the four aces?
Short answer
. Place the aces one at a time into the positions: the second ace must avoid the first ace's hand (), the third must avoid two hands () and the fourth three hands (). The product is .
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.3 Conditional Probability and Bayes' Formula, 'Aces', p.81; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
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