How to read this page
The full ranking chart, with card images and a quick-reference table, lives on our poker hands page. This article does something different: it goes hand by hand and explains what each one actually means at the table — how often it appears, what it beats, how it usually gets paid, and the specific way it loses money. Every frequency below is exact, taken from the 2,598,960 possible five-card hands in a 52-card deck.
Royal flush and straight flush
A straight flush is five cards in sequence, all of one suit. When the top card is an ace it is called a royal flush. There are 40 straight flushes in total — 4 of them royal, 36 not. A royal flush therefore appears in 1 of every 649,740 random five-card hands. In Hold'em you see seven cards, which makes it considerably more frequent than that, but it is still the hand most players go years without making. How it loses money: it does not lose, it fails to earn. The standard mistake is betting large immediately and folding out every hand that could have paid. With the absolute nuts, the question is never whether you win — it is how to extract the most from an opponent who has something.
Four of a kind
Four cards of one rank, plus any fifth card. 624 combinations, 0.024% of hands, roughly 1 in 4,165. In Hold'em quads almost always come from a pocket pair hitting the case card, or from a paired board. The frequency matters less than the visibility: when the board is paired, every observant opponent knows quads and full houses are possible, and their willingness to pay drops sharply. How it loses money: the same extraction problem as a straight flush, compounded by the fact that quads on the board look far scarier than a set on an unpaired board.
Full house
Three of one rank plus two of another. 3,744 combinations, 0.144%, about 1 in 694. When two players hold a full house, the trips rank decides first and the pair is only a tiebreaker. Aces full of twos beats kings full of queens — the pair never rescues you. This is the single most common misreading of full houses at a table. How it loses money: playing a full house made with the board's pair and a weak trip rank. On a board of 9-9-4-4-K, everyone still in the hand has a full house, and your fours full is beaten by any nine and by any pocket pair above four.
Flush
Five cards of one suit, not in sequence. 5,108 combinations, 0.197%, about 1 in 509. A flush beats a straight, and the reason is exactly the frequency: straights occur twice as often. Between two flushes, the highest card wins, then the second, and so on — the suit itself is irrelevant. How it loses money: the non-nut flush. A queen-high flush in a big multiway pot is a hand that wins small pots and loses large ones, because the raises you face on a three-suited board come from the ace. Before you build a pot with a flush, ask which flushes are above yours.
Straight
Five cards in sequence of mixed suits. 10,200 combinations, 0.392%, about 1 in 255. The ace works at both ends: A-K-Q-J-T is the highest straight and A-2-3-4-5 (the wheel) is the lowest. It does not wrap — Q-K-A-2-3 is not a straight. How it loses money: holding the low end. With 8-9 on a T-J-Q board you have a straight, and anyone with a king holds a better one. The gap between the nut straight and the second-nut straight is one of the most expensive gaps in poker.
Three of a kind
Three cards of one rank. 54,912 combinations, 2.11%, about 1 in 47. Hold'em distinguishes two versions and the difference is practical, not cosmetic. A set is a pocket pair matching one board card — it is concealed and it wins big pots. Trips is one hole card matching a pair on the board — it is visible to everyone and shares the rank with anyone else holding that card, so the kicker decides. And the ranking correction most players need: three of a kind does NOT beat a straight. Trips are five times more common. How it loses money: continuing to build a pot with a set on a board that has completed four straight cards or three of a suit.
Two pair and one pair
Two pair: 123,552 combinations, 4.75%, about 1 in 21. One pair: 1,098,240 combinations, 42.26% — you make at least a pair in a five-card hand less than half the time, which surprises people. Two pair is compared top pair first, then bottom pair, then the single kicker. Kings and threes beats queens and jacks. How it loses money: two pair using the bottom two cards of the board is frequently second-best when the board improves, and one pair is the hand that pays off almost every big river bet in low-stakes poker. A pair of aces with a weak kicker is a hand to control the pot with, not a hand to grow it.
High card, and the frequency table
If none of the above apply, the highest card plays: 1,302,540 combinations, 50.12%. Just over half of all random five-card hands are nothing at all. The complete distribution is worth internalising, because it is the reason the ranking order looks the way it does — every category ranks above the one below it purely because it is rarer.
| Rank | Hand | Combinations | Probability | Approx. odds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Royal flush | 4 | 0.000154% | 1 in 649,740 |
| 2 | Straight flush | 36 | 0.00139% | 1 in 72,193 |
| 3 | Four of a kind | 624 | 0.0240% | 1 in 4,165 |
| 4 | Full house | 3,744 | 0.1441% | 1 in 694 |
| 5 | Flush | 5,108 | 0.1965% | 1 in 509 |
| 6 | Straight | 10,200 | 0.3925% | 1 in 255 |
| 7 | Three of a kind | 54,912 | 2.1128% | 1 in 47 |
| 8 | Two pair | 123,552 | 4.7539% | 1 in 21 |
| 9 | One pair | 1,098,240 | 42.257% | 1 in 2.4 |
| 10 | High card | 1,302,540 | 50.118% | 1 in 2 |
The exceptions to the standard order
The ranking above applies to Texas Hold'em, Omaha and standard five-card poker. Two families change it. Short Deck (6+ Hold'em) removes the deuces through fives. Flushes become rarer than full houses, so nearly every Short Deck ruleset promotes the flush above the full house. A minority of house games also promote three of a kind above a straight. Lowball and hi-lo games award part or all of the pot to the worst hand under a defined low ranking, which inverts the order for that half of the pot. Everywhere else, the ten categories above are fixed, and suits never break a tie.
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