The exercise firms run on final-round assessment days, where candidates quote against each other around a table. Here you play it against opponents that adapt to your quotes.
Start the Market of Cards drillFour other drills are free to try firstYou hold two private cards. Each opponent holds two you cannot see, and further cards are revealed to everyone over the course of the game. Every card in play sums to a hidden table value, and everything settles against it.
Card values: numbers are face value × 10; red jacks, queens and kings are +110, +120, +130; the black ones are negative; aces are +10. The average card is worth about 42.3.
Your estimate is your hand + revealed cards + 42.3 × the number of unseen cards. That is the anchor. Everything else is adjustment.
Because you know your own cards and nobody else does, your estimate is genuinely better than the naive average — but only for the portion you can see. Candidates routinely over-weight a strong hand and forget that ten unseen cards will pull the total toward the mean.
You must post a two-sided market no wider than 20, under a countdown, and opponents lift or hit you based on their own estimates. Their quotes leak information about their hands, and yours leaks information about yours.
Skewing is the core technique: if you are already long, quote both sides slightly lower to attract sellers rather than buyers. You are managing inventory, not just predicting a number.
Firms running this exercise are rarely measuring who guessed the table value most accurately. They watch whether you trade both ways, whether you manage risk as your position grows, whether you keep quoting under time pressure, and whether you update when the evidence changes.
A candidate who accumulates a large one-way position and happens to win usually scores worse than one who traded both sides for a smaller profit.