Poker Hand Rankings: The Complete 2026 Guide

Poker hand rankings are the one piece of the game you cannot reason your way through at the table — you either know them cold or you do not. The good news is that the order is not arbitrary. Every hand ranks exactly where it does because of how often it can be dealt, and once you have seen the numbers the sequence stops needing to be memorised at all.

This guide covers all ten hands in order, the odds of making each one, the tie-break rules that decide most close pots, and the specific pairs of hands that new players reverse most often.

The ten poker hands in order

From strongest to weakest:

1. Royal flush — A-K-Q-J-10, all of one suit
2. Straight flush — five cards in sequence, all of one suit
3. Four of a kind — four cards of the same rank
4. Full house — three of a kind plus a pair
5. Flush — any five cards of one suit
6. Straight — five cards in sequence, mixed suits
7. Three of a kind — three cards of the same rank
8. Two pair — two cards of one rank, two of another
9. One pair — two cards of the same rank
10. High card — none of the above

Every hand in poker is exactly five cards. In Texas Hold'em you are handed seven — two private cards and five shared — and your hand is the best five of those seven. You are never forced to use your own cards, which is why two players holding nothing can end up splitting a pot with the board.

The interactive hand rankings chart lets you click any hand to see everything that beats it and everything it beats, which is a faster way to fix the order in your head than a list.

Why the order is what it is

Poker hands rank by rarity, and nothing else. There are 2,598,960 distinct five-card hands in a 52-card deck. Count how many of them make each combination and the ranking falls out on its own:

Hand	Combinations	Odds
Royal flush	4	1 in 649,740
Straight flush	36	1 in 72,193
Four of a kind	624	1 in 4,165
Full house	3,744	1 in 694
Flush	5,108	1 in 509
Straight	10,200	1 in 255
Three of a kind	54,912	1 in 47
Two pair	123,552	1 in 21
One pair	1,098,240	1 in 2.4
High card	1,302,540	1 in 2

Read that column once and you never need the ranking list again. A full house beats a flush because 3,744 is smaller than 5,108. A flush beats a straight because 5,108 is smaller than 10,200. The whole hierarchy is a sorted frequency table.

It is also worth noticing how top-heavy the rarity is. The four best hands together account for well under one per cent of all deals. Almost every pot you play will be decided by two pair or worse, which is why the practical skill in poker is playing marginal hands well rather than waiting for monsters.

Each hand, in detail

Royal flush

A-K-Q-J-10 of the same suit. Four exist in the deck. It cannot be beaten and it cannot be tied by a better hand — two royal flushes in the same pot split.

Across seven cards in Hold'em, you will make one roughly once in every 31,000 hands. A full-time online player might see a handful in a year; most recreational players never make one.

Straight flush

Five suited cards in sequence, anything from 5-4-3-2-A up to K-Q-J-10-9. The ace plays high or low, so A-2-3-4-5 suited — the "steel wheel" — is a legitimate straight flush, but A-2-3-4-5 does not wrap around into K-A-2-3-4. Wrapping is never allowed in Hold'em.

Between two straight flushes, the higher top card wins.

Four of a kind

All four cards of one rank, plus a kicker. Quad aces beat quad kings; the kicker only matters when two players have the same quads, which in Hold'em means the quads are on the board and the highest fifth card takes it.

Full house

Three of a kind plus a pair — "aces full of kings" for A-A-A-K-K. Compare the trips first, always. Twos full of aces loses to threes full of deuces, because the three-card component is compared before the pair. This trips people up constantly at showdown.

Flush

Five cards of one suit. Compare the highest card first, then the second, and so on down all five. Suits themselves never break a tie — a spade flush and a heart flush of the same ranks split the pot.

The flush is the hand most often misplaced in the order, in both directions. A dedicated page covers what beats a flush with the full hierarchy and the traps, because it is the single most-searched ranking question in poker.

Straight

Five cards in sequence, suits irrelevant. The ace is the only card that plays both ways: A-2-3-4-5 is the lowest straight, called the wheel, and 10-J-Q-K-A is the highest, called Broadway. Between two straights, the higher top card wins, and identical straights chop.

Three of a kind

Three cards of one rank plus two kickers. In Hold'em there are two ways to make it, and they play very differently. A set is a pocket pair that hits a third card on the board — well disguised, and the reason small pairs are worth calling raises with. Trips means two of the rank are on the board and you hold the third, which is far more obvious to everyone at the table and much easier to get away from.

Two pair

Two cards of one rank, two of another, plus a kicker. Compare the higher pair first, then the lower pair, then the kicker. Aces and twos beats kings and queens — the top pair is all that matters until it ties.

One pair

Two cards of the same rank and three kickers. This wins more pots in Hold'em than any other holding, which surprises people who learned the game from televised final tables. Roughly 44% of seven-card Hold'em hands end up as exactly one pair.

High card

No pair, no straight, no flush. Compare cards one at a time from the top. Ace-high beats king-high; if the top cards tie, the next card decides, all the way down to the fifth.

What you will actually make in Hold'em

The five-card table above describes a single deal. In Hold'em you see seven cards, which makes everything considerably more likely. By the river, your final hand breaks down roughly like this:

• High card: 17.4%
• One pair: 43.8%
• Two pair: 23.5%
• Three of a kind: 4.8%
• Straight: 4.6%
• Flush: 3.0%
• Full house: 2.6%
• Four of a kind: 0.17%
• Straight flush: 0.028%
• Royal flush: 0.0032%

Two-thirds of hands finish as one pair or worse. If your mental model of poker is waiting for a flush, you will fold your way through 97% of the hands you are dealt.

Tie-breaks and kickers

Most close pots are settled by rules that are not part of the ranking list at all.

Only five cards play. Your hand is exactly five cards, never six or seven. If the board reads A-K-Q-J-10 with no flush possible, everyone still in the hand plays the board and the pot is split however good your hole cards are.

Kickers break ties within a rank. Holding A-K on an A-7-2 board beats A-Q: both players have a pair of aces, and the king outranks the queen as the next card. This is why offsuit ace-rag hands lose so much money — you make top pair and are then outkicked by anyone else who also has an ace.

Suits are never a tie-break. No suit outranks another in Hold'em. Suits are only used for procedural matters like awarding an odd chip in a split pot or deciding seat order at the start of a tournament.

Compare components in order. For a full house, trips first then the pair. For two pair, high pair, low pair, kicker. For flushes and high-card hands, card by card from the top. Reading the components in the wrong order accounts for most misread showdowns.

The two reversals everyone makes

Two pairs of hands get flipped far more than the rest combined.

Flush versus straight. The flush wins. There are twice as many straights as flushes in a five-card deal, and rarity sets the order. On a paired board, though, remember that a full house is now live and beats both.

Full house versus flush. The full house wins. Because Hold'em boards regularly make both hands possible at once, this is the reversal that costs real money: you get to the river holding a flush, the board is paired, and the pot is not yours.

A useful habit on any paired board is to ask what full houses are possible before you decide how much you are willing to put in with a flush. That single question prevents a large share of the worst river calls in the game.

Learning them properly

Rote memorisation of the list works, but it decays. Three things fix the order permanently:

1. Learn the frequency table, not the list. The order is a consequence of the numbers, so learning the numbers means you can always reconstruct the order.
2. Test yourself on pairs, not sequences. Reciting the list top to bottom is easy; answering "flush or full house?" instantly is the skill you actually need.
3. Keep a chart visible until it is automatic. A printable hand rankings chart next to the screen for a few sessions does more than an hour of study.

Once the rankings are automatic, the next two things worth learning are the full Texas Hold'em rules — who acts when, and what each action means — and then the strategy that sits on top of them. Knowing what beats what only tells you who wins at showdown; it says nothing about whether you should have been in the pot.

That gap is where most of the money goes, and it is well covered by the list of common beginner poker mistakes, most of which are committed by players who know the rankings perfectly.