Pick a card: draw random cards from a virtual deck
No deck in the drawer? This tool lets you pick a card at random from a full, shuffled deck, right in your browser. Draw one card or several, and the cards you draw stay out of the deck until you shuffle, just like real cards. It is free, there is no account and no app to install, and it works on a phone, tablet or computer.
How to draw cards
- How many cards. Tap “one card” in the sentence to draw 2, 3 or 5 cards at a time.
- Which deck. Use a standard 52-card deck, or switch to a deck with jokers: 54 cards, including two jokers.
- Draw. Press Draw, tap the deck or hit the Space bar. The cards are dealt face up, showing their rank and suit.
- Cards stay out. A drawn card doesn’t go back into the deck. A counter shows how many are left, for example “47 cards left”. If you ask for more cards than remain, you get the last ones, and when the deck is empty, the page tells you.
- Shuffle. The Shuffle button puts every card back and shuffles the whole deck.
- Recent draws. Your last draws stay in a row on the page, so you can look back at them.
The deck is kept in your browser, so if you leave and come back on the same device, it is still where you left it. The full screen button in the header makes the cards big for a table or a classroom, and the Sound button in the bottom bar mutes the dealing sound.
Ideas: what to do with a random card
- Card games without a deck. Play high card to decide who goes first, or “higher or lower”: draw a card, and everyone guesses whether the next one will be higher or lower. There is one deck on one screen, so it works best for games where the cards are shown face up to everyone.
- Magic trick practice. Have a friend draw a random card while you practice your patter and your reveal, or check how often a guess would be right by pure chance.
- Classroom probability. Draw 20 cards one at a time, tally the suits, and compare the result with the expected one in four. Then shuffle and try again.
- Writing prompts. Give each suit a theme, for example hearts for love, spades for conflict, diamonds for money and clubs for adventure. Draw three cards for the beginning, middle and end of a story.
- Party games, no drinking needed. Give each suit a small challenge: hearts tell a story, diamonds sing a line, clubs do an impression, spades answer a question. Draw a card for each player.
- Fair turns. Everyone draws one card. Highest card picks the movie, lowest does the dishes.
For a yes or no answer, try the yes or no tarot. For board games, there is the dice roller, and for a quick 50/50, flip a coin.
Card probabilities
The deck is shuffled with your browser’s cryptographic random generator, the same kind of source used for security, so every order of the cards is equally likely. With a full 52-card deck, these are the chances for one card:
| You draw | Chance | About |
|---|---|---|
| A card of a given suit, like any heart | 13 in 52, or 1 in 4 | 25% |
| A given rank, like any queen | 4 in 52, or 1 in 13 | 7.7% |
| An ace | 4 in 52, or 1 in 13 | 7.7% |
| A face card (jack, queen or king) | 12 in 52, or 3 in 13 | 23.1% |
| One specific card, like the queen of hearts | 1 in 52 | 1.9% |
| A joker, in the deck with jokers | 2 in 54, or 1 in 27 | 3.7% |
Because drawn cards don’t go back, the odds change as you go. Draw two cards, and the chance that both are aces is 4 in 52 times 3 in 51, or 1 in 221. If 40 cards are left and the last ace is among them, the next card is that ace 1 time in 40.
There are 2,598,960 different five-card hands in a 52-card deck. The number of ways to order a whole deck is far bigger: 52 × 51 × 50 and so on down to 1, a number with 68 digits. So a well-shuffled deck is very likely in an order no deck has ever been in before.
Where the joker comes from
The four suits used in English-speaking countries, spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs, come from French playing cards. The joker is much younger. It is generally traced to the United States in the 1860s, where it was added as an extra trump card for the game of euchre. Most decks still come with two jokers, and plenty of games leave them out, which is why they are optional here.