Rules and formats: hand rankings, showdown order and the shape of the common games

The order of poker hands is not a convention agreed on for convenience. It follows from counting. Out of the two and a half million or so distinct five-card hands that a fifty-two card deck can produce, straight flushes are the rarest and unpaired high-card hands are the most common, and every category in between sits exactly where its frequency puts it. A player who understands that the ranking is a frequency table rather than a list to memorise will rarely misremember it.

Two hands in the same category are separated by rank and then by the remaining cards, highest first. Two flushes are compared by their highest card, then the next, and so on down. Two full houses are compared by the three matching cards first. Two pairs are compared by the higher pair, then the lower, then the single unmatched card. When every one of the five cards matches in rank, the hands tie and the pot is divided, regardless of suit: no suit outranks another in the ranking itself.

In community-card games the hand is always the best five cards available, and both, one or neither of a player's own two cards may be used. A player whose two cards contribute nothing plays the five community cards themselves, which is why a strong board can produce a divided pot between players holding entirely different hands.

Rules & Formats

Hand rankings and the order of the showdown

The ranking of hands follows directly from how rare each one is, and the order in which cards are shown at the end follows from who bet last.

By Poker News Strategy