The chart: all ten hands in order
Every form of standard poker — Texas Hold’em included — uses the same ten-hand hierarchy. Higher on the table beats everything below it.
| # | Hand | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Royal flush | A, K, Q, J, 10, all one suit | A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ 10♠ |
| 2 | Straight flush | Five consecutive cards, one suit | 9♥ 8♥ 7♥ 6♥ 5♥ |
| 3 | Four of a kind | Four cards of the same rank | Q♣ Q♦ Q♥ Q♠ 7♦ |
| 4 | Full house | Three of a kind plus a pair | J♠ J♦ J♣ 4♥ 4♠ |
| 5 | Flush | Any five cards of one suit | A♦ J♦ 8♦ 6♦ 2♦ |
| 6 | Straight | Five consecutive cards, mixed suits | 8♣ 7♦ 6♠ 5♥ 4♣ |
| 7 | Three of a kind | Three cards of the same rank | 9♠ 9♥ 9♦ K♣ 2♠ |
| 8 | Two pair | Two different pairs | A♥ A♣ 6♦ 6♠ Q♥ |
| 9 | One pair | Two cards of the same rank | 10♦ 10♣ A♠ 7♥ 3♦ |
| 10 | High card | None of the above | A♣ J♥ 8♦ 5♠ 2♣ |
Print it, or don’t: after a few sessions the order stops needing a chart. The two rules below are the ones that keep catching people after the chart is memorised.
Does a flush beat a straight?
Yes. A flush beats a straight, and a full house beats a flush. These two neighbouring pairs cause more mid-hand doubt than the rest of the chart combined.
The order tracks rarity. Five cards of one suit are harder to make than five in a row, so the flush ranks higher; filling a full house is harder still. If you remember nothing else from this page: straight, then flush, then full house, going up.
What happens when two players have the same hand?
The higher version wins, and the comparison works through the hand from the top.
- Same type, different ranks: a king-high flush beats a queen-high flush; three jacks beat three nines; aces and sixes beat kings and queens.
- Identical made part: the leftover cards — the kickers — decide. A pair of tens with an ace kicker beats a pair of tens with a king kicker.
- Truly identical hands: the pot splits. Suits never break a tie in standard poker.
One Hold’em-specific trap: you make your best five-card hand from seven cards, and only five count. If the board itself is the best five, the players split, whatever they hold.
How rare is each hand?
The chart’s order is the rarity order. Out of every possible five-card hand — 2,598,960 of them — here is how many make each rank, and roughly how often you will see one dealt.
| Hand | Ways to make it | Odds of being dealt it |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
These are the five-card figures — plain combinatorics, the same in every deck. In Hold’em you build your hand from seven cards, so completed hands show up more often than this table suggests, but the order never changes, because the order is nothing more than this rarity ranking written out.
Two things worth noticing in the numbers. Half of all hands are nothing at all — high card — which is why winning at showdown is rarer than new players expect. And the gap between neighbouring hands is huge at the top: a full house is over seven hundred times rarer than a pair. The chart is not ten evenly spaced steps; it is a cliff.
What is the best card, and does the ace play low?
The ace is the highest card in the deck, and it is also the only card that plays both ends of a straight. A-2-3-4-5 — the wheel — is the lowest straight, and the ace in it counts low: it loses to 2-3-4-5-6. A-K-Q-J-10 is the highest. What the ace cannot do is wrap around; K-A-2-3-4 is nothing.
Quick answers to the common match-ups
The questions that come up mid-hand, settled in a line each:
- Does two pair beat three of a kind? No. Three of a kind wins.
- Does a straight beat three of a kind? Yes.
- Does a flush beat a full house? No. The full house wins.
- Does four of a kind beat a full house? Yes.
- Does a higher two pair beat a lower one? The highest pair decides first: aces and twos beat kings and queens.
- Do suits ever decide who wins? No. No suit outranks another in standard poker.
- Can a straight go around the corner (K-A-2)? No. The ace plays high or low, never in the middle.
- What beats a royal flush? Nothing. It is the best possible hand, and two players cannot both hold one in the same suit.
How it works in Texas Hold’em: best five of seven
In Hold’em you hold two cards and share five community cards, and your hand is the best five of those seven. Only five ever count. Three worked examples cover most of the confusion:
- Your pair on a paired board. You hold K♠ K♦ on a board of 9♣ 9♥ 4♦ 7♠ 2♣. Your five: K-K-9-9-7 — two pair, kings and nines, not “three pair”. The 4 and 2 never play.
- The board plays. You hold 8♦ 3♣ on A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ 10♠ — a royal flush on the board. Your best five is the board; so is everyone else’s. Split pot.
- The hidden straight. You hold 6♥ 5♥ on 4♣ 7♦ 8♠ K♥ A♦. Your five: 8-7-6-5-4 — a straight, using both hole cards and ignoring the ace and king entirely.
The habit to build: at showdown, name your best five out loud. Miscounting a board — calling two pair “three pair”, missing that a flush on the table plays for both players — costs real pots, and it is the most preventable mistake in the game.
Knowing the chart is not the same as knowing what to play
The rankings tell you what wins at showdown. They say nothing about the decision that actually starts every hand: whether your two cards are worth playing from your seat before the flop. A pair of tens is a fine hand on this chart and a fold, a call or a raise depending on where you sit and what happened in front of you.
That decision is what separates players much faster than showdown knowledge does. Where you sit changes everything — our poker positions guide explains why the same cards play differently from different seats — and the PlusEV preflop trainer turns those preflop decisions into a drill, one dealt spot at a time, with the EV of every option shown after you answer.