Related papers: Big Two and n-card poker probabilities
The $n$ queens problem considers the maximum number of safe squares on an $n \times n$ chess board when placing $n$ queens; the answer is only known for small $n$. Miller, Sheng and Turek considered instead $n$ randomly placed rooks,…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
Mahjong is a very popular tile-based game commonly played by four players. Each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and, in turn, players draw and discard (i.e., change) tiles until they complete a legal hand using a 14th tile. In this…
A chain is an ordering of the integers 1 to n such that adjacent pairs have sums of a particular form, such as squares, cubes, triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, or Fibonacci numbers. For example 4 1 2 3 5 form a Fibonacci chain while…
We investigate the expected number of calls required to achieve Bingo in a generalized (n,m)-Bingo game, where each n x n card is filled by sampling n numbers from m possible values per column. Using the inclusion-exclusion principle, we…
This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…
E. Thorp introduced the following card shuffling model. Suppose the number of cards $n$ is even. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or from the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip.…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
This work explains how to utilize earlier results by P. Diaconis, K. Houston-Edwards and the second author to estimate probabilities related to the 4-player gambler ruin problem. For instance, we show that the probability that a very…
A random $n$-permutation may be generated by sequentially removing random cards $C_1,...,C_n$ from an $n$-card deck $D = \{1,...,n\}$. The permutation $\sigma$ is simply the sequence of cards in the order they are removed. This permutation…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
In the game of poker, being unpredictable, or bluffing, is an essential skill. When humans play poker, they bluff. However, most works on computer-poker focus on performance metrics such as win rates, while bluffing is overlooked. In this…
Artificial intelligence has seen several breakthroughs in recent years, with games often serving as milestones. A common feature of these games is that players have perfect information. Poker is the quintessential game of imperfect…
We consider a problem of shuffling a deck of cards with ordered labels. Namely we split the deck of N=k^tq cards (where t>=1 is maximal) into k equally sized stacks and then take the top card off of each stack and sort them by the order of…
A deck of $n$ cards are shuffled by repeatedly taking off the top card, flipping it with probability $1/2$, and inserting it back into the deck at a random position. This process can be considered as a Markov chain on the group $B_n$ of…
Chess tableaux are a special kind of standard Young tableaux where, in the chessboard coloring of the Young diagram, even numbers always appear in white cells and odd numbers in black cells. If, for $\lambda$ a partition of $n$,…
Motivated by the controversy in the chess community, where Hikaru Nakamura, a renowned grandmaster, has posted multiple impressive winning streaks over the years on the online platform chess.com, we derive the probabilities of various types…
Poker is ideal for testing automated reasoning under uncertainty. It introduces uncertainty both by physical randomization and by incomplete information about opponents hands.Another source OF uncertainty IS the limited information…