What Beats a Flush in Poker?

Why a flush sits fifth

Poker hand rankings are not arbitrary and they are not a matter of tradition. They are a frequency table. Every hand is ranked by how hard it is to make from a 52-card deck, and the order falls straight out of the arithmetic. There are 2,598,960 distinct five-card hands. Of those, 5,108 are flushes — about one in every 509 hands dealt.

Line the four hands that beat a flush up against that number and the ordering explains itself:

• Full house — 3,744 ways. Rarer than a flush, so it wins.
• Four of a kind — 624 ways, roughly one in every 4,165 hands.
• Straight flush — 36 ways once you set the royals aside.
• Royal flush — 4 ways. One per suit, and that is the whole supply.

And the hand immediately below a flush, the straight, has 10,200 ways to make it — twice as many as a flush. That is the entire reason a flush beats a straight, and it is worth knowing the number rather than the rule, because the number is the thing you can reconstruct at the table when you are not sure.

The straight-versus-flush mistake

Almost every new player gets this backwards at least once, and there is a reason. A straight looks harder. Five cards in a row feels like a more specific requirement than five cards that merely share a suit. But a straight can be made from any suits at all — that is four choices per card, or 4⁵ = 1,024 suit combinations for each run of five ranks. A flush has to hit one suit five times in a row. The suit constraint is far more punishing than the sequence constraint, and the counts show it.

Which flush wins when two players have one

Compare the highest card in each flush. If those tie, the second, then the third, and so on down to the fifth. A flush of A♥ J♥ 9♥ 6♥ 3♥ beats K♥ Q♥ J♥ T♥ 9♥ — the ace is all that matters, and the second hand’s near-straight counts for nothing.

Suits never break the tie. There is no ranking of spades over hearts in Texas Hold’em. If two players hold flushes whose five playing cards are identical in rank, the pot is split. This comes up more than you might expect on four-flush boards, where both players are using the same four community cards and only one hole card each.

The word for the card that settles it is the kicker, and the principle generalises: whenever two hands land in the same category, the highest cards that actually play decide it. If you want to see this for any pair of hands, the full interactive hand rankings chart lets you compare any two categories side by side.

The nut flush, and why the ace matters so much

A flush containing the ace of that suit is called the nut flush, and holding it changes the hand completely. Every other flush is second-best by definition, which means it is a hand that wins small pots and loses big ones. Experienced players will happily put a lot of money in with the nut flush and get away cheaply with a jack-high one, and the gap between those two outcomes is a large part of what separates winning players from losing ones.

This is also why suited aces are worth more than their raw equity suggests, and why they show up in raising ranges from every position. They make the one flush that is never dominated.

How often you actually make a flush

The 5,108-in-2,598,960 figure is for five cards dealt at once. Texas Hold’em gives you seven, so the practical number is higher: about 3.0% of hands played to the river end up as a flush.

Two numbers worth memorising:

• Two suited hole cards flop a flush about 0.8% of the time.
• A flush draw on the flop — four to the flush with two cards to come — gets there about 35% of the time.

That 35% is the number that governs almost every flush-draw decision you will face, and it is why the rule of four exists: multiply your outs (9, for a flush draw) by four to approximate your chance of hitting by the river. 9 × 4 = 36, against a true 35%. Close enough to act on.

Whether that makes a call correct depends on the price you are being offered, which is a separate calculation — see the pot odds calculator for that side of it.

Flushes in other poker variants

The rankings above are for high-hand poker: Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven Card Stud, and most other games you are likely to encounter. A few variants change the picture:

• Omaha uses the same rankings, but you must use exactly two hole cards and three from the board. Four cards of one suit in your hand is a trap, not a strength — you can only ever use two of them.
• Lowball games (2-7 Triple Draw, Razz) invert the order. In 2-7, a flush is a bad hand.
• Short deck removes the deuces through fives, which makes flushes rarer than full houses. There, a flush beats a full house — the only common variant where the order genuinely changes, and it changes for exactly the reason the standard order exists.

That last case is the clearest evidence that the ranking is a frequency table rather than a convention. Change the deck, and the order follows the new arithmetic.

The one-line version

A flush beats everything except a full house, four of a kind, a straight flush and a royal flush. It beats a straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair and high card. When two flushes meet, the highest card wins and suits are irrelevant. If you remember only one thing, remember that a flush beats a straight — it is the ranking that costs beginners the most money.