Buddy, you decide to put a catchy title on an opinion piece which in my take is poorly written. Say whatever you want but these days that's called clickbait, and clickbait content only does one thing for it's audience: waste their time. It's your bad luck this article popped up on my feed, I have strong opinions about wasting other people's time.

I hope hashnode adds a downvote emoji or something. Clickbait sensationalist. This article is annoying to say the least. Not even going to comment on the content.

I think you got it, the worst case is 3n. In "normal" bubble sort you have to make n compares n times hence the O(n^2) to get all elements sorted. In your case, since bubble sort has a side effect of having the largest element being sorted out first and you only need 3 of those, then you would at worst have to make n compares 3 times.