I purchased $5$ decks of cards from the store and shuffled them all together. Now I have $260$ mixed cards ($5$ decks $\times$ $52$ cards).
What is the minimum number of cards I need to take out from the $260$ cards to get a full house?
I purchased $5$ decks of cards from the store and shuffled them all together. Now I have $260$ mixed cards ($5$ decks $\times$ $52$ cards).
What is the minimum number of cards I need to take out from the $260$ cards to get a full house?
The solution I sketched in the comments is too hasty. Assuming we do not count five of a kind as a full house, then the worst hand you can draw would have $20$ of one rank, and one each of all the other ranks. Thus $20+12=32$ cards in total. Therefore the minimum required number is actually $\fbox {33}$.
To check carefully that $33$ works, suppose we had a "bad" hand with $33$ cards.
First note that you must have at least three cards of some given rank. This is because $2\times 13=26<33$. Say we have $N≥3$ of that given rank. Of course we can't have more than $1$ card in each of the following ranks. Suppose that we have exactly one of each of $J$ suits, $J≤12$. Thus we have $N+J$ cards. It follows that $N+J=33\implies N≥21$. But we can't have $21$ cards of a given rank, so we have a contradiction.