- Fact-checked by Josh Miller
- Edited by Diana Westfield
How many cards in a deck? Fifty-two, plus two jokers in most packs you’ll buy. That number shapes every card game and every card probability you’ll ever work out, so it’s worth knowing how it breaks down: four suits, thirteen ranks, twelve face cards, twenty-six of each colour. Here’s the deck taken apart, with the odds that fall straight out of it.
How many cards in a deck, and how they split
| Group | How many | Chance of drawing one |
|---|---|---|
| Whole deck | 52 (54 with jokers) | – |
| Each suit (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades) | 13 | 1 in 4 |
| Red cards, black cards | 26 each | 1 in 2 |
| Each rank (all the aces, all the sevens…) | 4 | 1 in 13 |
| Face cards (J, Q, K) | 12 | 3 in 13 |
| Ten-value cards in blackjack (10, J, Q, K) | 16 | 4 in 13 |
| One exact card (say the queen of spades) | 1 | 1 in 52 |
The thirteen ranks run ace, 2 to 10, jack, queen, king. Whether the ace counts high, low or both depends on the game: in poker it’s both (A-2-3-4-5 and 10-J-Q-K-A are both straights), in blackjack it’s 1 or 11, and in cribbage it’s always low.
What is a face card in playing cards?
Jacks, queens and kings, the cards with people on them. There are twelve. Aces aren’t face cards, though people say “picture cards” loosely and sometimes mean the aces as well. Look closely at a king of hearts next time you play. He’s the only king without a moustache, and he looks like he’s sticking a sword through his own head, a printing quirk from centuries of copying the old French designs.
How many jokers are in a deck of cards?
Open a new pack and you’ll usually find two. They usually differ slightly, one in colour and one in black, and some games use that difference. Most of the classic gambling games don’t use them at all: poker, blackjack and baccarat are all played with 52 cards, and casino shoes just hold more decks of 52. Jokers turn up as wild cards in home poker games, in rummy and canasta, and in a few casino variants like Pai Gow poker, where one joker is added to make a 53-card deck.
How many poker cards in a deck?
52. That’s the same deck, and it’s why poker odds work out the way they do. It’s also why a royal flush is so rare: of the 2,598,960 five-card hands you could be dealt, only four are royals. Play short deck, where the 2s to 5s come out and you’re left with 36 cards, and something odd happens, flushes get harder to make than full houses, so the rules flip them round. The CasinoCalcs short deck odds calculator handles that version.
Shuffles and odds
Here’s a fact that sounds made up but isn’t: shuffle a deck properly and you’ve almost certainly made an order of 52 cards nobody has ever held before, because there are about 8 followed by 67 zeros of them. “Properly” means about seven riffle shuffles, mind. The lazy overhand shuffle most of us do at the kitchen table barely mixes anything.
If you’re after something specific, say you want to know how likely two aces are in a five-card hand, the card probability calculator does it from the deck you describe. The card shuffler and random card generator deal real random cards, and the poker hand rankings page lists the odds of every hand.