Poker Hand Rankings
All ten poker hands from royal flush to high card, the exact probability of each, and the ranking rules people get wrong — including which flush beats which and how kickers decide.
Every poker hand is exactly five cards, and the ranking follows one principle: the rarer the hand, the higher it beats. Learn the probabilities and the order stops being a list to memorise and becomes something you can derive.
The ten hands
Best to worst, with the probability of being dealt it in five cards from a 52-card deck:
| Rank | Hand | Example | Combinations | Probability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Royal flush | A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ 10♠ | 4 | 0.000154% |
| 2 | Straight flush | 9♥ 8♥ 7♥ 6♥ 5♥ | 36 | 0.00139% |
| 3 | Four of a kind | Q Q Q Q 7 | 624 | 0.0240% |
| 4 | Full house | K K K 4 4 | 3,744 | 0.144% |
| 5 | Flush | A♣ J♣ 8♣ 5♣ 2♣ | 5,108 | 0.197% |
| 6 | Straight | 8 7 6 5 4 | 10,200 | 0.392% |
| 7 | Three of a kind | 9 9 9 K 2 | 54,912 | 2.11% |
| 8 | Two pair | J J 5 5 A | 123,552 | 4.75% |
| 9 | One pair | 10 10 A 7 3 | 1,098,240 | 42.3% |
| 10 | High card | A Q 9 6 3 | 1,302,540 | 50.1% |
| Total | 2,598,960 | 100% |
Half of all five-card hands are nothing but a high card. Fewer than one in a thousand is a flush or better. That distribution is the entire reason the ranking looks the way it does.
Why flush beats straight
This is the ranking most often questioned, and the answer is just the table above: there are 5,108 possible flushes and 10,200 possible straights. The straight is nearly twice as common, so it ranks lower.
The counterintuitive part is that a straight — five cards in sequence of any suit — feels harder to make than five cards of one suit. It is not. There are only ten possible straight “shapes” (A-5 through 10-A) but each can be made in many suit combinations, while a flush, though it fixes the suit, allows any five of the thirteen ranks in that suit. The arithmetic comes out in the straight’s favour, so the straight is the weaker hand.
Note the reversal in three-card poker: with only three cards, a straight becomes rarer than a flush, and the ranking flips. The principle — rarer beats commoner — is constant; the probabilities change with the number of cards.
Breaking ties
When two players hold the same category, these rules decide the pot.
High card and pairs — compare kickers in order. A pair of tens with an ace kicker beats a pair of tens with a king kicker. If the first kicker ties, compare the next, and so on. All five cards can matter.
Two pair — highest pair first, then second pair, then kicker. Kings-and-fours beats queens-and-jacks, because the top pair is compared first. Only if both pairs match does the fifth card decide.
Straights and flushes — highest card wins. A straight to the queen beats a straight to the jack. A flush is compared card by card from the top: A-K-8-5-2 beats A-K-7-6-3.
Full house — three of a kind first. Kings-full-of-twos beats queens-full-of-aces, because the trips are compared before the pair.
The ace is both high and low in straights. A-2-3-4-5 is the lowest straight (the “wheel”), where the ace plays low. A-K-Q-J-10 is the highest. But A-2-3-4-5 does not wrap — there is no Q-K-A-2-3.
Hands that tie
Poker hands can genuinely tie, and the pot is split. This happens most often when the best five-card hand is entirely on the board in community-card games, or when two players hold the same pair with identical kickers. Suits never break the tie — two players with the same flush ranks split the pot.
The rankings do not change by game
Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven-Card Stud and Five-Card Draw all use this same ranking for the best five-card hand. What differs is how you get to five cards — two hole cards plus five community cards in Hold’em, your best five of seven in Stud — not what beats what at showdown.
The exceptions are “lowball” variants (Razz, 2-7 Triple Draw) where the worst hand wins, and “high-low split” games where the pot divides between the best and worst hands. Those invert or split the ranking deliberately; everything standard uses the table above.
Next: Texas Hold’em rules · pot odds