Probability of the $5$ card hand contains the J and Q or J and 10

probabilitystatistics

$5$ cards are drawn randomly from the small deck (13 cards;one suit). The drawn cards are not placed back into the deck. What is the probability that the resulting five-card hand contains the Jack and the Queen or the hand contains the Jack and the 10?

I am having issues solving this one. I know that there are $13$ cards. And that pulling out $5$ cards gives an outcome of $1287$ combinations. Also I know that this is a without replacement problem.

Best Answer

It is as easy as PIE (the Principle of Inclusion and Exclusion).$$\mathsf P(A\cup B)=\mathsf P(A)+\mathsf P(B)-\mathsf P(A\cap B)$$

The sample space contains $\binom{13}5$ equally probable ways to select five cards from the small deck, without replacement or bias.

There are $\binom {11}3$ ways to select the Jack, the Queen, and three other cards from the small deck.

Likewise there are $\binom{11}3$ ways to select the 10, the Jack, and three other cards from the small deck.

But wait!   We do not wish to over-count, and there are $\binom {10}2$ ways to select the 10, the Jack, and the Queen from the small deck.

Thus the probability for our favoured event is:$$\dfrac{2\binom {11}3-\binom {10}2}{\binom{13}5}$$


Remark: Using a small deck makes this easy. We do not have to worry about the possibility of pairs or such; there is only one card for each kind in the deck.

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