Poker Hand Rankings
How it works
Poker hands rank the same way in five-card draw, Texas hold'em, Omaha and video poker, from the royal flush at the top to a single high card at the bottom. A hand always uses exactly five cards, so in hold'em you make the best five out of your two hole cards and the five on the board. Suits never break a tie between equal hands, which means two identical straights split the pot. When two players hold the same kind of hand, the higher cards decide it, and the unused side cards called kickers settle what is left.
The odds in the table are exact counts, not estimates. Of the 2,598,960 possible five-card hands, only four are royal flushes and more than half hold nothing better than a high card, and our test suite checks those counts by going through every single hand. The seven-card column gives the chance that your best five out of seven cards land in each class, which is what a hold'em player who sees the river faces. Seven cards make pairs and two pair far more common, and a high card hand drops to about one deal in six.
A few edge cases trip up new players. The ace plays high in a straight to the ace and low in the five-high straight called the wheel, but it cannot wrap around from king to two. A full house is ranked by its three of a kind first, so three eights with two threes beat three sevens with two aces. A flush with an ace beats a flush with a king no matter how strong the lower cards are, and the comparison goes down card by card until one differs.
How to use it
The ranking table shows an example of every hand drawn as cards. Under it, tap five, six or seven cards in the card grid to build a hand, and the checker names the best poker hand they make and outlines the five cards that form it. Tap a picked card again to remove it, or use Clear to start over. The checker uses the same rules as the table, including the ace-low straight.