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Card Games Kings And Queens

January 12th, 2010 |

Author: Bryan

People of the Book gambling card game?

In the novel People of the Book, a character played a card game at Carnivale. He counted from 1 to 13, flipping a card at every number, and tried to turn over a card that matched what he said out loud. (1 was ace, 11 was jack, 12 was queen, 13 was king) Does anybody know if this is a real game? Does it have a name?

Hi Andrea,

I’m still looking, but I can’t find any card game like that.

Do you know if an entire deck is used? Or just a total of 13 cards.

If your’re curious, I figured out the probabilities of at least one hit, assuming just a 13-card deck, and going through it just one time, like you described.

The odds of NOT getting a hit on each card are 12/13. Multiplying 12/13 by itself 13 times equals .3535. Subtract this from 1 and there’s your chances of GETTING a hit… about 64.67%. (I think.)

I then wrote a computer program that simulates this game, to confirm this. (It only took a minute… I’m a computer programmer.) Sure enough, when the computer played the game a million times, it “won” the game 63.23% of the time. (My random number generator may be off… if 64.67% is the correct percentage then the simulation percentages should not be off by 1.4%, not after a million trials.)

Anyway, either way it’s a nice edge. Knowing that might win me a bar bet or two. I’ll take a 28% edge on a proposition any day! Thanks.

Card Magic – Ruff’s Kings’n'queens