Poker Hands: Rankings Chart in Order, with the Odds of Each

The chart lists the poker hands ranked by how rare they are. Every step up the list is a hand that turns up less often in a random deal of five cards, which is the whole logic of the order: the harder a hand is to make, the more it is worth. The odds column shows how often each hand appears in five cards dealt from a full 52-card deck; the section on odds below gives the exact counts and shows how each one is worked out.

The same poker hands order applies in almost every form of the game you are likely to meet in Britain: Texas Hold'em and Omaha in card rooms and online, five card draw at a kitchen table, and seven card stud. The few exceptions, such as three card poker in casinos, are covered further down the page.

How to read a hand

A poker hand is always exactly five cards. In games with more cards, such as Hold'em where you have seven to choose from, you use the best five and ignore the rest. Cards outside the five never count, not even to break a tie.

Within each type, the ranks of the cards decide which of two hands is better. Aces are highest, then King, Queen, Jack and 10 down to 2. Suits have no value in standard poker: a flush in spades is not better than a flush in hearts.

Royal flush

Ace, King, Queen, Jack and 10, all of one suit. It is simply the highest possible straight flush, given its own name because it cannot be beaten. There are only four in the deck, one per suit.

Straight flush

Five cards in sequence and all of the same suit, such as 9-8-7-6-5 of hearts. The lowest is 5-4-3-2-A of one suit, and the highest below the royal is K-Q-J-10-9. Two straight flushes are compared by their top card.

Four of a kind

All four cards of one rank plus any fifth card, for example four Queens and a 7. Players also call it quads. Higher quads beat lower quads; the fifth card only matters when two players share four of a kind on the board, which can happen in Hold'em.

Full house

Three cards of one rank with two of another. You describe it by the three first: J-J-J-4-4 is “Jacks full of fours”. Between two full houses, the three cards decide; Jacks full of twos beats tens full of Aces.

Flush

Any five cards of one suit that do not run in sequence. The flush with the highest top card wins, and if those match, the second card decides, and so on down to the fifth. It does not matter how many cards of the suit are on the board as long as your best five are suited.

Straight

Five cards in a row, in any mix of suits. The Ace can sit at either end, high in A-K-Q-J-10 or low in 5-4-3-2-A, so there are ten possible straights. Between two straights, the one with the higher top card wins, and identical straights split the pot.

Three of a kind

Three cards of one rank and two unrelated cards. In Hold'em, players distinguish a set, made with a pair in your hand and one matching card on the board, from trips, made with one card in your hand and a pair on the board. Both rank the same; the difference is only how well hidden the hand is.

Two pair

Two different pairs and a fifth card. The higher pair is compared first, then the lower pair, then the kicker. With seven cards you may hold three pairs, in which case you play the two highest and the best remaining card as the kicker.

One pair

Two cards of the same rank with three unrelated cards. It is the most common made hand: 42% of five-card deals and almost 44% of seven-card hands end as exactly one pair. Ties are settled by the pair, then the highest of the three kickers, then the next.

High card

A hand that makes none of the above. It is valued by its highest card, then the next, so K-J-8-5-2 is called “King high”. In five-card deals this is the single most common result, slightly more than half of all hands.

The order matters because the checks overlap. A flush that is also a straight is a straight flush, and a hand with three of a kind and a pair is a full house, not just trips. Running through the steps from the top means you never under-call a hand. In Hold'em, do the same check on your seven cards, then pick the five that give the highest result.

A useful habit at the table is to ask what the best possible hand on the board is before you look at your own cards again. If the board shows three hearts, someone could have a flush; if it shows a pair, a full house is possible. That one question avoids most of the expensive surprises at the showdown.

The flush against straight comparison is the one most often got wrong, partly because straights feel harder to collect. In a five-card deal the opposite is true: there are almost exactly twice as many straights as flushes, so the flush is worth more. The reason is the number of suits. Four suits of thirteen cards give fewer ways to fill one suit than ten possible sequences give ways to fill a run.

A full house beating a flush makes the same point from another angle. You might expect five matching suits to be harder than a pair and three of a kind, but there are 3,744 full houses against 5,108 flushes. In short-deck poker, played without the 2s to 5s, that balance shifts and many rule sets let a flush beat a full house. Agree the rule before you play.^{1 (source)}

How we counted every hand

We produced this table in two independent ways. First, a short program dealt every one of the 2,598,960 possible five-card hands and sorted each into its type. Second, the counting formula in the right-hand column gives the same number for every row. The two methods agree exactly, and they match the published figures.^{2 (source)} The notation C(n, k) means the number of ways to choose k cards from n.

Take the full house as a worked example. Pick the rank for the three of a kind (13 choices), then three of its four suits (4 ways). Pick a different rank for the pair (12 choices), then two of its four suits (6 ways). Multiply: 13 × 4 × 12 × 6 = 3,744.

Every row is built the same way, subtracting overlaps where one count would include a better hand, which is why 40 straight flushes are removed from both the flush and the straight.

These odds describe five cards dealt once, as in five card draw before anyone changes a card. They are not the odds of finishing with each hand in Hold'em, where you see seven cards. That changes the picture a great deal, as the next section shows.

With seven cards, you finish with one pair (43.8%) or two pair (23.5%) more often than with high card only (17.4%), so high card is no longer the most common result. The poker hands ranked on this page keep their five-card order anyway: the rankings are fixed by the five-card counts, so two pair still beats one pair and one pair still beats high card in every Hold'em game.

In Hold'em you may use both hole cards, one of them or neither. If the five community cards make the best hand on their own, every player still in the hand is "playing the board" and the pot is split.^{3 (source)} Because the board is shared, ties are far more common than in five card draw, and kickers decide many more pots.

Seven cards also mean that hands which look strong in isolation are often beaten. Two pair, which beats more than nine in ten five-card hands, is a modest holding by the river once you remember that every opponent is building from the same five cards. Reading the board, and asking what the best possible hand on it is, matters more than memorising the chart. Our Texas Hold'em rules page walks through a full hand from the blinds to the river.

The rule to remember is that the most important cards are compared first. In two pair, the higher pair decides before anything else, so Kings and threes beat Queens and Jacks even though the Queen-Jack hand looks stronger card for card. Only if both pairs match does the fifth card come into play.

Kickers only count when they are part of the best five-card hand. In Hold'em, if the board shows A-A-K-K-Q and you hold J-10, your best hand is A-A-K-K-Q and your hole cards play no part. An opponent holding 7-2 has exactly the same hand, and the pot is split.

The wheel is the lowest straight. If two players hold 5-4-3-2-A and 6-5-4-3-2, the 6-high straight wins, even though the first hand contains an Ace. At the other end, A-K-Q-J-10 is the highest straight, and in a single suit it becomes the royal flush.

A straight such as Q-K-A-2-3 is not a hand at all. It is high card, Ace high. New players get this wrong more often than any other rule, usually at home games where nobody has settled it in advance.

Some games that rank hands for the lowest total, such as the low half of split-pot games, treat the Ace as the lowest card throughout and may ignore straights and flushes for the low hand. Those are separate rankings for a separate pot, and the standard high-hand order on this page is unchanged.

Learning the poker hands order is easier with a few real comparisons. Try a flush against a straight, two full houses with the same pair, or two identical straights in different suits, and the checker explains which rule decides each case. It needs JavaScript; without it, the tie-break table above gives the same answers.

The principle is the same as in five-card poker: rarer hands rank higher. With three cards, there are 1,096 flushes but only 720 straights, so the order of those two swaps. Three card poker is a common table game in British casinos, played against the dealer, who needs Queen high or better to qualify.^{4 (source)} Its house edge and the other casino poker games are compared on our house edge page.

When you play poker against other players, the house takes no part in the hands. It charges a fee or keeps a small share of each pot, and the standard poker hand rankings on this page apply throughout. The rules of the betting itself are on our poker rules page.