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The hedging game in quant trading interviews is a live market-making exercise: the interviewer asks you to quote a bid and an ask on an uncertain quantity — typically the sum of hidden cards or dice — trades against your quote, then reveals information one piece at a time while offering you side bets and options on the outcome. Optiver, SIG, IMC and Jane Street all run a version of this round, and the grading is on process, not the final number: did your quotes track fair value, and did you cover the inventory you got filled on instead of letting it ride.
This free game replays that round end to end. You open a fixed 8-wide market on the sum of four hidden cards, the desk trades the side it likes — and is informed often enough to pick off a lazy quote — and as each card flips you re-quote and work the desk's offers: a board of binaries at quoted odds, a put or call sized to your book, and a Dutch auction on an option that ticks down to a hidden reserve. The last card settles every position at once.
Card values are independent and uniform 1–13, so fair value and every option price are exact, and the score can separate luck from decisions: P&L, a Making grade for quote discipline, and a Taking grade for the EV of the offers you accepted and whether you finished covered. That is the same distinction the interviewer is drawing on the other side of the table.
A live market-making exercise: you quote a bid and ask on an uncertain quantity, often the sum of hidden cards or dice. The interviewer trades against you, reveals information stepwise, and offers side bets or options. You are assessed on quote placement, inventory management and whether you hedge exposure.
Optiver, SIG, IMC and Jane Street trading interviews all run variants of make-a-market games on cards or dice, with re-quoting as information reveals and offers to hedge or bet along the way. This game is an original drill in that style, not a transcript of any one firm's round.
Three ways: raw P&L at settlement, a Making grade for quote discipline (how your bid/ask sat relative to exact fair value), and a Taking grade for the expected value of the bets, hedges and auction buys you accepted and whether you ended the hand covered.
Only expected value. Each card averages 7, so r unrevealed cards average 7r, and the tutorial walks through how the binary odds, calls and puts pay off. The distribution is exact, so you can reason about every price rather than guess.