Determining opponents card magic trick

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You have a standard pack of $52$ cards.

Your opponent takes $5$ cards at random from the deck and hands them to your partner.

Your partner looks at the cards and gives you $4$ of the cards one at a time before giving the 5th card to your opponent.

You can now tell your opponent what his card is with 100% accuracy.

Assume the only way you know your opponents card is through the order in which your partner gave the $4$ cards to you.

What is the strategy used so you can always correctly name your opponents card based on the order the $4$ cards are given to you?


I figure that with $5$ cards and only $4$ suits you have to have a repeated suit and therefore you can determine the suit based on a specific card given to you.

I am not sure how you can give the value of the card using your remaining $3$ cards. Alternatively the 4th card has more meaning than just telling the suit?


Apparently this strategy can be applied to a higher number of cards, $n$, for which all $n$ are mutually distinguishable. What is the value of $n$?

Based on this extra part to the question I figure the suit part of the $52$ pack of cards is actually not necessary to create the strategy.

All suggestions on where to go with this is appreciated.

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