How to use the playing card shuffler
- Choose the number of players, from 1 to 10, and how many cards each player gets. Choose whether to add jokers.
- Press Shuffle and deal. Every press starts from a fresh deck, shuffles it completely and deals again.
- Read each hand. Every card is shown with its rank and suit symbol and its full name, so the suit is never shown by color alone. Tick Also show the rest of the deck to see the cards left over in order.
- Use Copy result to put the hands on your clipboard as text.
Five cards from one deck
With one player and five cards, pressing Shuffle and deal returns five different cards from one shuffled deck of 52, and 47 are left. With three players and three cards each, the deck is dealt one card at a time around the table: the first card goes to player 1, the second to player 2, the third to player 3, and the fourth to player 1 again.
Dealing 4 players 13 cards each uses the whole deck and leaves none. Dealing more cards than the deck holds, such as 4 players with 14 cards each, is refused with a message, because 56 cards cannot come from a deck of 52.
How the shuffle works
The deck is shuffled with the Fisher-Yates method. Starting from the last card, each card is swapped with a card chosen at random from the cards before it and itself. When every random choice is equally likely, every one of the 52 factorial possible orders is equally likely, which is a number with 68 digits. The random choices come from the secure random source your browser provides, using rejection sampling so that no choice is even slightly more likely than another.
This matters because some quick shuffles are biased. Sorting a deck by a random number, for example, favors some orders. A proper shuffle has no such flaw. The tool shuffles the whole deck every time, so the cards you see are not affected by earlier deals.
Using it for games
Cards are dealt one at a time to each player in turn, as at a table. For a game that needs a draw pile, tick the option to see the rest of the deck, which lists the remaining cards in the order they would be drawn. For other random choices see the random number generator, the list randomizer and the coin flip.
The tool does not know the rules of any game and does not keep score. Nothing about your deals is stored or sent anywhere, and closing the page forgets them.
Assumptions and limits
- The deck has 13 ranks in each of 4 suits, plus 0, 1 or 2 jokers if you choose them.
- Every deal starts from a new, fully shuffled deck. There are no repeated cards inside one deal.
- Randomness comes from your browser's secure random generator. Results are not seeded and cannot be replayed.
- Cards are dealt one at a time to each player in turn.
Frequently asked questions
Is the shuffle really random?
It is as random as your browser's secure random generator, and the shuffle itself is unbiased, so every order of the deck is equally likely. It is suitable for games and drawings but is not a replacement for a certified draw.
Why can I not deal more than 52 cards?
A deal draws from one deck without putting cards back, so the number of cards dealt cannot exceed the cards in the deck, 52 or 53 or 54 with jokers.
Does each press use the same deck?
No. Each press shuffles a fresh deck, so a card dealt earlier can appear again. To keep drawing from the same shuffled deck, deal all you need at once and tick the rest of the deck option.
How many different shuffles are there?
A 52 card deck has 52 factorial orders, about 8 followed by 67 zeros. A fair shuffle makes each one equally likely, so a shuffled deck is almost certainly in an order that has never occurred before.