[Math] If you have a deck of 52 cards and you deal three cards (one-by-one).

conditional probabilityprobability

(a) Find the conditional probability that the third card is a queen given that the first two cards are kings.

(b) Find the conditional probability that the third card is a queen given that the first two cards are spades.

(c) Find the conditional probability that the first card is a spade given that the second card is an ace and the third card is a king.

I was confused by part (b) and (c), should I use multiplication rule and Baye's Rule to calculate the results? Are they suppose to be independent?

For (b), isnt it possible that the first two draws include a spade queen?

Best Answer

For each of these, we approach directly via definitions of conditional probability.

$$Pr(A\mid B) = \dfrac{Pr(A\cap B)}{Pr(B)}$$

  • (a) The probability that the third card is a queen given that the first two cards are kings.

Here, we calculate the probability that the first two cards are kings as well as the probability that the first two are kings and the third is a queen. The first two are kings happens with probability $\dfrac{4\times 3}{52\times 51}$, seen by direct applications of multiplication principle and counting techniques. Similarly, the probability that the first two are kings and the third is a queen will be $\dfrac{4\times 3\times 4}{52\times 51\times 50}$.

Taking the ratio, the result is going to be $\dfrac{4}{50}$. You might have just skipped straight to the result here, noting that regardless what the two kings happened to be, after they are drawn there will always be four queens left out of 50 cards available.


  • (b) The probability that the third card is a queen given that the first two cards are spades.

This one is a bit trickier. We begin the same way, calculating the probability that the first two cards are both spades. This will be $\dfrac{13\times 12}{52\times 51}$, no real difficulty there.

Now, the probability that the third card is a queen and the first two cards are spades... as you correctly noted it is possible that one of the spades were also a queen which would affect our chances of pulling a queen on the third draw. To calculate this, let us choose the cards out of order... beginning by choosing the third card and then choosing the others. We could either choose the queen of spades and then two other spades, or we could choose a different queen followed by two spades. We have then a probability of $\dfrac{1\times 12\times 11 + 3\times 13\times 12}{52\times 51\times 50}$ for the probability of having two spades followed by a queen.

Taking the ratio, we have the conditional probability is then:

$$\dfrac{11+3\times 13}{13\times 50}=\dfrac{1}{13}$$

Interestingly, this is exactly the same as the probability that the third card was a queen., thus proving that the events are in fact independent. It was worth being cautious about this however and not assuming that they were independent before proving it to be the case.


For the third, I would approach similarly to how I did for the second, breaking into cases based on if the spade happened to be an ace or king.

$\dfrac{\frac{11\times 4\times 4+1\times 3\times 4 + 1\times 4\times 3}{52\times 51\times 50}}{\frac{4\times 4}{52\times 51}} = \dfrac{1}{4}$