Expected top rank among four dealt cards
Question
Four cards are dealt from a well-shuffled standard deck. Counting aces as , number cards at face value, jacks as , queens as and kings as , what is the expected value of the highest of the four cards, to two decimal places?
Short answer
(exactly ). The maximum is at most exactly when all four cards come from the cards of rank , so . Then .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
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