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Free throws where accuracy follows past success

Question

Frank's opening free throw goes in and his next one does not. From the third attempt on, the chance he makes any given shot equals the fraction of his earlier attempts that went in. What is the probability that he has made exactly 5050 of his first 100100 attempts?

Short answer

1/991/99. This is a Pólya urn started with one make and one miss. For such an urn the number of additional makes in the next mm shots is uniform on {0,…,m}\{0,\dots,m\}, so over the remaining 9898 shots each of the 9999 totals is equally likely, including exactly 4949 more makes.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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