Poker Hand Rankings in Order

The order, and why it is that order

Poker hand rankings are a frequency table. Every hand is ranked by how many ways there are to make it out of the 2,598,960 possible five-card hands, and the rarer the hand, the higher it sits. Nothing about the order is traditional or arbitrary — you can derive the whole thing from a deck of cards and some counting.

Here is the full count, which is the ranking:

• 1. Royal flush — 4 ways (0.0002% of hands dealt)
• 2. Straight flush — 36 ways (0.0014% of hands dealt)
• 3. Four of a kind — 624 ways (0.02% of hands dealt)
• 4. Full house — 3,744 ways (0.14% of hands dealt)
• 5. Flush — 5,108 ways (0.20% of hands dealt)
• 6. Straight — 10,200 ways (0.39% of hands dealt)
• 7. Three of a kind — 54,912 ways (2.11% of hands dealt)
• 8. Two pair — 123,552 ways (4.75% of hands dealt)
• 9. One pair — 1,098,240 ways (42.26% of hands dealt)
• 10. High card — 1,302,540 ways (50.12% of hands dealt)

Read down that list and the ranking is simply the numbers in ascending order. Four royal flushes exist. There are 1,302,540 ways to make nothing at all. Everything in between falls where the arithmetic puts it.

Five cards versus seven

The percentages above are for five cards dealt at once. Texas Hold’em gives you seven to choose from, which changes the picture substantially. The interactive chart shows both, but the headline differences are worth stating:

• Two pair jumps from 4.75% to about 23.5%. With seven cards and a paired board, two pair is common rather than notable.
• High card collapses from 50.1% to about 17.4%. With seven cards you usually have something.
• One pair barely moves — around 43% either way — which makes it far and away the most common made hand in Hold’em.

That last figure is the practically important one. Most pots are decided between two hands where at least one of them is a single pair, and overvaluing one pair is the leak that costs new players the most money.

The three rankings people get wrong

A flush beats a straight. This is the big one. A straight looks harder to make because five consecutive ranks feels specific, but a straight can be any suits at all, and there are twice as many of them. The full breakdown of what beats a flush covers exactly why.

Three of a kind beats two pair. Two pair uses four cards to make something and trips uses three, so intuition says two pair should win. It doesn’t: there are 123,552 ways to make two pair against 54,912 ways to make trips.

The ace plays both high and low, but never wraps. A-K-Q-J-T is the highest straight and A-2-3-4-5 (the wheel) is the lowest. Q-K-A-2-3 is not a straight at all — it is ace high.

Ties, kickers and split pots

When two hands land in the same category, the highest cards that actually play decide it. On a board of A-9-5-3-2, a player holding A-K beats a player holding A-Q: both have a pair of aces, and the king outkicks the queen. If the five cards that play are identical, the pot is split.

Suits never break a tie. There is no ranking of spades over hearts in Texas Hold’em, and two identical flushes in different suits chop the pot. Suits are used only for procedural things like awarding an odd chip or deciding seat draws.

Learning the order for real

Reading the list is not the same as knowing it. The order becomes automatic once you have had to use it under time pressure a few dozen times, which is a different exercise from memorising a chart. Start with the complete beginner’s guide to poker for the context, then work out which hands to actually play from each position — which is where hand rankings stop being trivia and start being strategy.