Doesn't a sorted array trigger the worst case in that case? Either ascending or decending. It's one of the reasons not to choose the first element as the pivot,

Doesn't a sorted array trigger the worst case in that case? Either ascending or decending. It's one of the reasons not to choose the first element as the pivot, iirc. A much more interesting case is the median-of-three pivot. (Namely, median of first / middle / last elements). You can still do it, however.