[Math] the probability that 5 randomly chosen cards in a deck add up to 40 or greater

probability

I have made a probability game, where you have to pull out any 5 cards without looking (from a deck of 52 cards), and if all five cards add up to 40 or more, they player pulling the 5 cards from the deck wins. What is the probability of winning the game?

Face and Ace Card values:

Ace = 1

Jack = 11

Queen = 12

King = 13

The value of the number cards are the ones that are stated on the card: for example a card that has 2 on it has a value of 2.

There is also a grand prize, and it would be if it just added up to 40. How many combinations are there and why?

Best Answer

Normal approximation:

Consider a single card draw from the deck:

E(X)=7

Var(X)=14

With the sum of 5 cards (drawn without replacement):

$E(X)=7 \times 5$

$\text{Var}(X)=14\times 5\times \frac{52-5}{52-1}$

(the last term being the 'finite population correction', which applies as much to the variance of the sum as it does to the variance of the mean).

The approach to normality in this situation is reasonably rapid.

This suggests the sum on 5 cards might be be roughly approximated by a normal distribution with mean $35$ and variance $70\times\frac{47}{51}\approx 64.5098$. Using a continuity correction this gives an approximate probability of totalling at least 40 on 5 cards of:

$$1-\Phi(\frac{39.5-35}{\sqrt{70\times\frac{_{47}}{^{51}}}})\approx 0.288$$

Simulation (in R) of ten million five-card draws indicates the probability is
about $0.293$ (with s.e. $\approx 1.4\times 10^{-4}$):

 res=replicate(10000000,sum(sample(rep(1:13,4),5,replace=FALSE)));mean(res>=40)  
 [1] 0.2927447

As a check on the earlier calculation of the variance, the standard deviation of of those simulated sums was 8.0316; the previous calculation gives 8.0318.

Edit: Here's a comparison of the empirical cdf of the simulated data with the above normal approximation; they're pretty close:

enter image description here

More extensive simulations are consistent with the other two answers based on complete enumeration:

enter image description here

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