Random Card Generator
The random card generator draws playing cards from a standard 52-card deck, or from 54 cards with two jokers. Choose how many cards to draw and press Draw Cards: drawn cards stay out of the deck until you reset it.
Updated
Cards remaining in deck: 52
How the random card generator draws a card
The page builds a standard 52-card deck, 13 ranks from 2 to ace in each of four suits: spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. Tick Include Jokers for a 54-card deck. A deck sold in the US or Britain usually comes with two jokers, the same number the page adds.
Each card you draw is taken out of the deck, so no card can come up twice until you press Reset Deck. The counter shows how many cards are left.
For each card the page picks one of the remaining cards, each with the same chance, and removes it. Dealing this way is equivalent to a fair shuffle. Each pick is an unbiased draw from the browser's cryptographic random generator, as described in how our randomness works.
Odds of drawing a card from a full 52-card deck
The first card drawn from a full deck has a chance of 1 in 52 of being any particular card. The table shows a few common questions.
| First card from a full 52-card deck | Chance |
|---|---|
| One particular card, such as the queen of hearts | 1 in 52 (1.9%) |
| An ace | 4 in 52 (7.7%) |
| A heart | 13 in 52 (25%) |
| A red card | 26 in 52 (50%) |
| A face card (jack, queen or king) | 12 in 52 (23.1%) |
| A joker, with jokers included (54 cards) | 2 in 54 (3.7%) |
After the first card the chances shift as cards leave the deck, as they do at a real table. If the first card is an ace, the next one is an ace with a chance of 3 in 51 (5.9%). Two aces as the first two cards happen once in 221 deals.
How to deal five-card hands: a worked example
- Set Number of cards to draw to 5.
- Press Draw Cards. Five cards appear and the counter drops from 52 to 47.
- Press Draw Cards again for the next player. The new hand comes from the 47 cards left, so it cannot repeat a card from the first hand.
- Press Reset Deck to put all 52 cards back before the next round.
A 52-card deck holds 2,598,960 different five-card hands. Ten players at five cards each use 50 cards; an eleventh hand of five is refused, because only 2 cards are left.
For a game to play with the cards, the random game generator has a card games filter. Games that need dice or a coin as well can use the dice roller and the coin flip.
Questions about the random card generator
Are the cards shuffled?
In effect, yes. Each draw takes one card at random from the cards still in the deck, which gives every order of the deck the same chance, as a perfect shuffle would. A 52-card deck has about 8.07 × 1067 possible orders.
Can the same card come up twice?
Not until you reset. Drawn cards leave the deck, so the queen of hearts can appear only once per deck. To draw with replacement, press Reset Deck before each draw.
What happens when the deck runs out?
The button changes to “Deck Empty - Reset to Continue”. If you ask for more cards than are left, the page tells you how many remain and draws nothing. Ticking or unticking Include Jokers also starts a fresh deck.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Standard 52-card deck — the 13 ranks and four suits the deck is built from (checked October 16, 2026)
- Wikipedia: Joker (playing card) — the two jokers in a US or British deck (checked October 16, 2026)