October 10, 2021

By Deane Barker
30 min AMRAP
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Draw five cards
Order the cards high to low
(Aces are 11, face cards are 10)

FIRST (reps based on each card value):
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Highest: Cal Bike
Next: Sit Ups
Next: Air Squats
Next: Push Ups
Lowest: Pull-Ups

SECOND (number of burpees)
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High Card, 9 or less: 7
High Card, 10 or better: 6
Pair, 9 or less: 5
Pair, 10 or better: 4
Two Pair: 3
3 of a Kind: 2
Full House: 1
Anything better: 0

Go get another hand...

Note that there are a lot of 10s…

Of the 13 different cards in a suit, four of them are effectively 10s. This means that you’ll do exactly 10 reps about 30% of the time, and at least 10 (and sometimes 11) about 40% of the time.

(Once, while testing this workout, I pulled four face cards and a 10, which meant I did 10 reps of everything.)

I did some testing with a code simulation of a deck.

For the rep counts, I did several simulations of 1,000 draws, and these are the averages you’ll do for each movement:

This was incredibly consistent. To get any variation in these numbers, I had to reduce the number of test draws to less than 40 – anything over 40, and they invariably settled into these numbers.

At 10 draws, which is an entire deck, the individual rep counts changed by 1 in either direction, at most.

For the burpees, here are the average number of hands it takes to draw the following in five cards from a freshly shuffled deck (I did 50 iterations for each):

Anything over this got pretty rare. (In particular, drawing a natural Royal Flush took about 700,000 draws.) Each time I did this workout, I got through 7-8 hands. So you can expect a 3-4 pairs, and, if you’re lucky, two pair maybe once.

This is item #146 in a sequence of 229 items.

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