How should I practice Poker Suit Expected Profit?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related IMC Trading phone screen problems in FastPrep.

Is Poker Suit Expected Profit associated with IMC Trading?

FastPrep tags this as a IMC Trading phone screen coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Poker Suit Expected Profit

IMC Trading● EasyNEW GRADPHONE SCREEN

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Problem statement

For this exercise, assume a deck contains 52 ordinary cards: 13 cards in each of four suits. Add exactly one joker. Choose one suit before drawing one card uniformly from the resulting 53-card deck.

The net payoff follows these rules:

If the card has your chosen suit, receive winPrize.
The joker matches every suit, so drawing it also earns winPrize.
Any other card loses lossPenalty, giving net payoff -lossPenalty.

For this exercise, assume winPrize and lossPenalty are nonnegative integer inputs generalizing the reported stakes. These amounts are net gains and losses; there is no additional entry fee.

Return the expected net profit from one play as a double. Preserve a negative expectation when applicable and do not round to an integer. Complete pokerSuitExpectedProfit(winPrize, lossPenalty).

An answer is accepted when abs(actual - expected) <= 1e-9 * max(1, abs(expected)).

What the interview report shared

The report used a gain of 4 and a loss of 1, then scaled both amounts to millions. It asked about accepting one play versus repeated plays. This practice exercise calculates the per-play expectation; it does not ask for a personal choice about taking that risk.

Function

pokerSuitExpectedProfit(winPrize: int, lossPenalty: int) → double

Examples

Example 1

winPrize = 4lossPenalty = 1return = 0.32075471698113206

Under this exercise's deck model, 14 cards win and 39 lose. The expected net profit is (14 * 4 - 39 * 1) / 53 = 17 / 53, approximately 0.32075471698113206.

Example 2

winPrize = 4000000lossPenalty = 1000000return = 320754.71698113205

The reported larger stakes multiply both payoffs by 10^6. The expectation is 17000000 / 53, approximately 320754.7169811321.

Example 3

winPrize = 1lossPenalty = 1return = -0.4716981132075472

The winning and losing gains have equal magnitude, but the losing outcomes are more common. The expectation is (14 - 39) / 53 = -25 / 53, approximately -0.4716981132075472.

Constraints

For this exercise, assume 0 <= winPrize, lossPenalty <= 10^9.
The draw is uniform over all 53 cards and the chosen suit is fixed before the draw.
Return the unrounded expected net profit per play, which may be positive, zero, or negative.