Picking colored balls randomly.

card-gamesprobabilityrandom

I created this post yesterday but I have a further enquiry that I will post here.

In 13 balls we have: 5 Blue 4 Red 4 Green

We randomly select 6 balls without replacement, what is the probability of having 2 blue, 2 red and 1 green? (The color of the last ball does not matter)


I think that this could be done by taking:

${5 \choose 2}\times{4 \choose 2}\times{4 \choose 1}\times{8 \choose 1} = 1920$

as the total number of combinations that has 2 blue, 2 red and 1 green, then dividing by the total number of 6 hand combos ${13 \choose 6} = 1719$

Obviously there is an issue here as $\frac{1920}{1719}>1$, but I'm not sure what's wrong

Best Answer

The problem, with that hypergeometric distribution way of solving it, is that ${8}\choose{1}$. That would suggest, that there are 5+4+4+8 = 21 balls in total. You could for example distinguish between the cases for the color of the last ball: ${5\choose 3} \cdot {4\choose 2} \cdot {4 \choose 1} + {5\choose 2} \cdot {4\choose 3} \cdot {4 \choose 1} + {5\choose 2} \cdot {4\choose 2} \cdot {4 \choose 2}$