What are the odds of a card ending up in its standard position?

That's easy enough - it's 1 in 52.
A card can be in any one of 52 positions, only one of which is its "standard position" - and there's no bias that favours one position over another.

UPDATE What follows doesn't scale correctly ... it aint right IOW - probably the linkage that salva was getting at.

The chance that none of the cards are in their standard position is simply (51/52) ** 52, which is around 0.3643 or approximately 1 in 3.
Therefore the chance that 1 or more cards are in their standard position is 1 - ((51/52) ** 52) which is around 0.6357 or approximately 2 in 3.
(You could turn this into a rather boring game of patience/solitaire.)

As for what you're actually trying to calculate, I'm still trying ot get my head around it.
(Please stick to cards in future ;-)

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^3: [OT] Stats problem by syphilis
in thread [OT] Stats problem by BrowserUk

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