Find The First Player to win K Games in a Row
A medium-tier problem at 39% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Simulation. Reported in interviews at IBM and 0 others.
You're given a list of game results and need to find the first player to rack up K consecutive wins. IBM's asked this one. It sounds simple until you realize the naive approach will burn through your time on the assessment, especially when K is large or the input is messy. The trick isn't complex, but missing it means you're rewriting logic on the fly while the proctor watches. If this problem hits your live OA and you blank on the simulation pattern, StealthCoder solves it in seconds, invisible to the screen share.
Companies that ask "Find The First Player to win K Games in a Row"
Find The First Player to win K Games in a Row is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Built by an engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage.
Get StealthCoderThe core pattern is a single-pass simulation: track the current winner and a running win counter. Every time the player changes, reset the counter. When it hits K, return that player. The gotcha is handling edge cases: what if the input is empty, K is zero, or K is larger than the total games played. Most candidates overcomplicate it with hashmaps or multiple passes. The acceptance rate of 39 percent suggests people are either misunderstanding the problem statement or building overly complex solutions. Array and Simulation mean you're iterating once and maintaining state, not searching or preprocessing. StealthCoder handles the edge cases and output format correctly so you don't waste five minutes debugging off-by-ones.
Pattern tags
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Find The First Player to win K Games in a Row recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Built by an engineer who got tired of watching his cohort grind for six months and still get filtered at the OA stage. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Find The First Player to win K Games in a Row interview FAQ
Is this problem still asked at IBM?+
It's in the reported data for IBM. Lower frequency overall (only one company listed), so it's not a mainstream problem. That said, simulation problems do show up in screening rounds. If you see it, it's likely a problem-solving filter, not a deep algorithmic test.
What's the trick to making this efficient?+
Single pass through the array with a running counter. No preprocessing, no extra data structures. Reset the counter when the player changes. Time is O(n), space is O(1). Most failures come from overengineering or mishandling the state transition logic.
How hard is a 39 percent acceptance rate really?+
Below 50 percent means either the problem is harder than it looks or the problem statement is ambiguous. For this one, it's likely statement clarity. People misread what "first to win K in a row" means or forget edge cases like K greater than total games.
Does this need array-specific techniques?+
Not advanced ones. You're iterating and checking values. No sorting, binary search, or sliding window tricks. Array here just means you're given the input as a sequential list and you process it once.
Should I worry about multiple languages or constraints?+
The problem is straightforward to code in any language. Time limit isn't specified, but a clean O(n) solution should run in milliseconds. Focus on correctness first, then clarity. Edge case handling (empty input, K too large) is where people lose points.
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