Poker hand rankings

The order is not arbitrary. Every hand beats the one below it because it is rarer than the one below it, counted over five cards, and on five cards that holds exactly, all the way down the list. If you ever forget whether a flush beats a straight, the question you’re really asking is which one is harder to make. It’s the flush.

Deal seven cards instead of five, which is what Hold’em does, and the rule breaks in exactly one place. It is at the bottom of the list, it is the most useful thing on this page, and it has its own paragraph further down.

Two players can easily make “the same” hand. Three rules settle almost every case.

Rank first. A pair of kings beats a pair of nines. Three queens beat three sevens. Compare the part of the hand that names it before anything else.

Then kickers. If the named part ties, the remaining cards decide, highest first. A-K against A-Q, on a board of A-8-5-3-2, is a pair of aces each. The king plays and wins. Kickers are where most beginner pots are quietly lost, and they’re the main reason ace-rag is a worse hand than it looks.

Suits never break a tie. There is no suit order in Texas Hold’em. If two hands are genuinely identical, the pot is split. This surprises people who’ve played other card games, so it’s worth saying flatly: a heart flush and a spade flush of the same ranks are the same hand.

The ace plays high and low, but never round the corner. A-K-Q-J-10 is the highest straight. A-2-3-4-5 is the lowest, and it’s the only straight where the ace counts as a one. Q-K-A-2-3 is not a straight at all. Nothing wraps.

Your best five cards might not include your cards. You make the best five from the seven available, and sometimes all five of those are on the table. If the board is A-K-Q-J-10 with no flush possible, everyone still in the hand has the same straight and the pot is split, no matter what they’re holding. Beginners often fold in that spot thinking they’ve lost.

Here is the part most rankings pages leave out, and it’s the part that changes how you play.

Read that honestly: these are the odds for seven random cards, not for hands that reach a showdown. Real play is not random, because people fold. But the shape of the table is the useful bit, and the shape says three things.

A single pair is a real hand. Nearly half of all seven-card holdings end up as exactly one pair, and pairs win an enormous number of pots. New players routinely fold winners because a pair “doesn’t feel like enough”. It usually is.

One pair is commoner than no pair at all, which is the one place the ranking’s own logic turns over. One pair beats high card because on five cards it is rarer. Deal seven and it stops being rarer, because missing every pair across seven cards is harder than hitting one: high card arrives 17.4% of the time and one pair 43.8%. The order above is not wrong, it is settled on five cards and this table is seven. What it means at a table is that having nothing is rarer, and worse, than a rankings chart makes it look.

The big hands are rare enough that waiting for them is not a strategy. A full house or better turns up under three times in a hundred. If your plan is to fold until you’re dealt something spectacular, the blinds will take your chips long before the cards do.

Poker has an old habit of naming starting hands. Pocket aces are Pocket Rockets. Ace-king is Big Slick. Two eights are Snowmen. Seven-two offsuit, the worst hand in Hold’em, is The Hammer.

None of this affects what beats what. It’s just the culture the game carries around with it, and it’s genuinely useful for talking about hands out loud. Pip whispers the name when you’re dealt one, which is a nicer way to learn them than a list.