Card guessing after an asymmetric riffle shuffle
Combinatorics
2026-02-13 v2 Probability
Abstract
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of cards labeled up to is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value , the riffle shuffle is assumed to be unbalanced, such that the cut is expected to happen at position . The goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards: one after another a single card is drawn from the top, and shown to the guesser until no cards remain. We provide a detailed analysis of the optimal guessing strategy and study the distribution of the number of correct guesses.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.16607,
title = {Card guessing after an asymmetric riffle shuffle},
author = {Markus Kuba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16607},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
20 pages, 3 figures. Refernces updated. Extends results of arXiv:2306.16079