Rank my cards

What this card-sequence probability question tests

This is an easy probability question that asks you to reason about the likelihood of drawing cards in a specific order from a standard deck. It's the kind of warm-up question quant interviewers use to check whether you can set up a counting problem cleanly and think through conditional probability without overthinking.

The problem rewards careful enumeration: you need to count the total number of ways to draw three cards in sequence, then count how many of those sequences satisfy the constraint. The key insight is recognizing whether order matters and how to avoid double-counting. Most candidates benefit from thinking through a smaller example first, then scaling up to the full deck.

• Counting with and without replacement
• Conditional probability across sequential draws
• Symmetry and cases in discrete probability