Texas Holdem Highest Hands
In high games, like Texas hold 'em and seven-card stud, the highest-ranking hands win. In low games, like razz, the lowest-ranking hands win. In high-low split games, both the highest-ranking and lowest-ranking hands win, though different rules are used to rank the high and low hands. Official Poker Hand Rankings Know your poker hand order. A poker hand consists of five cards, which fall into several categories. Below is the complete list of poker hands, from highest to lowest. Please note that hand rankings for Short Deck are slightly different. Find out more about the short deck poker hand rankings on the dedicated page. In this example we have a hand which is Queen high. If players share the same highest card, then it goes to the value of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and even 5th card if necessary. A hand of Queen, 10, 9, 5, 4, would beat our example hand. Community Cards. As you already know, a poker hand consists of five cards.
Low-stakes poker players in casinos love promotions, which allow them, if luck is on their side, to take home a lot more money than they could expect to win through straight poker.
I wrote for PokerNews a basic, introductory guide to the operation and rules of the most common types of promotions here. That guide, however, does not discuss how the presence of a promotion changes the dynamics of the poker game, and how one should alter strategy accordingly. That’s what I’d like to start addressing in this article.
Perhaps the most common promotion, at least in the Las Vegas card rooms, is a high-hand bonus. Typically if you have four of a kind or a straight flush or royal flush, using both hole cards, you win some cash. The amount might be fixed, might be determined by spinning a wheel, or might climb every day until somebody claims the bonus and then it gets reset to a baseline.
Let’s start with four of a kind. In order to claim the bonus, you’ll need to start with a pocket pair and have the other two cards of that rank appear among the five community cards. (Most promotions of this type exist only for Texas hold’em.) What is the probability of this happening?
Suppose I have . Among the board of five community cards, the and will need to appear. Let’s assume I don’t care whether they come on the flop, the turn, or the river, so that we can ignore the possible orders in which the cards come. We need to calculate how many possible five-card boards there are, and how many of those contain both of the black sevens.
There are 50 unknown cards. How many different combinations of five cards can be picked from 50? The math is tedious but straightforward. If you want to explore the formula, you can consult this Wikipedia entry, but the quick answer is 2,118,760.
How many of these contain the black sevens? We can just specify that those two cards are on the board and ask how many possible combinations of the remaining three cards exist. That works out to 17,296.
Divide the two numbers, and we learn that about 1 out of every 122 possible boards contains the two cards that we’re looking for.
What is that worth? Suppose that the high-hand bonus being offered is $100. It might be more or less than that, but that’s a fairly typical amount. If you played every pocket pair to the river attempting to win that bonus, the additional equity your pair gains from the promotion is $100 distributed over 122 attempts, or less than $1 per hand.
Even at the lowest-stakes fixed-limit games, that amount is so small that it is completely dwarfed by the standard poker considerations of when a pocket pair is worth playing. Even if the bonus were $500, the equity per attempt would be just $4 — again not enough that it should change how you play preflop.
What if you flop a set and hope to improve it to quads? Now you have two shots at getting one specific card. Each time, the probability is about 2%, for a combined probability of about 4%. Four percent of a $100 bonus is $4 worth of additional equity. In other words, flopping a set in a poker room with a $100 bonus for quads makes your hand worth, on average, $4 more than it otherwise would be. That might be enough to shift how you play in the very lowest stakes of fixed-limit games, but not when the blinds are higher, nor in any no-limit game.
In no-limit hold’em, your object needs to be capturing an opponent’s entire stack. Compared to that, the extra $4 of equity is negligible, and should not affect your play. Even if the room were offering $500 — which doesn’t happen often — the extra $20 of equity from the flopped set still should not distract you from the goal of stacking an opponent. It especially should not distract you from protecting your own stack from going to an opponent when the board texture and betting send a clear signal that your set is no good.
What about straight flushes? Poker rooms typically offer more for those than for quads, but they are correspondingly rarer. The math is harder to work out because it depends on what you start with. For example, with there are four ways to make straight flushes, while with there is only one. But let’s take that as an example.
I’ll cut straight to the answer, though the math and logic follow the same pattern as we used for the quads. There are again 2,118,760 possible five-card boards, of which 4,324 will contain one of the four three-card combinations that will complete a straight flush with . That yields a probability of 0.2%. In other words, -suited will turn into a straight flush about twice out of every thousand times you play them.
Suppose the casino offers $500 for making that straight flush. The equity that adds to your starting hand is then about $1. Again, it should be obvious that that is not enough incentive to alter how you play the hand. If you are tempted, say, to play from early position in the hope of taking home a big jackpot, you are actually costing yourself money, because the amount you can expect to lose in the pot completely swamps your expected value from the bonus.
Bottom line: Unless high-hand bonuses are exceptionally large (i.e., into thousands of dollars), they are not worth chasing by deviating from what would otherwise be your optimal play. Think of the bonus as a nice little extra that you might get, rather than as something that you are actively pursuing.
I will occasionally revisit this general topic with analysis of how your play should change in the presence of other kinds of promotions.
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.
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With few exceptions, all poker games place hands on the same
scale from high- to low-value. Poker hands are ranked depending
on their likelihood. The least-likely hands are the
highest-ranked; the most common hands are the lowest-ranked.
Identical poker hands are ranked by which hands holds cards of
the highest value.
Poker Hand Rank
Here is the standard hand rank, from highest to lowest:
A royal flush is a hand where all the cards are of the same suit and the 5 highest cards in consecutive order (10, J, Q, K, A). This hand is the best hand that you can get in the game of Texas Hold’em.
A straight flush is a hand where all the cards are of the same suit and are in consecutive order. For example, a 23456, all of hearts, is a straight flush. In the event of a tie, the straight flush with the highest card wins.
A 4 of a kind is a hand where 4 of the 5 cards are of the same ranking. An example of a hand with a 4 of a kind might have KKKK2. That would be the 2 in every suit–clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. In the event of a tie, the 4 of a kind with the highest hand ranking wins.
A full house is a hand that consists of 3 cards of one rank and 2 cards of another rank. An example of a full house might look like this: KKKQQ. In the event of a tie, the hand with the higher cards in the 3 cards is the winner.
A flush is a hand that consists of 5 cards of the same suit—clubs, diamonds, hearts, or spades. In the event of a tie, the flush with the highest card is the winner.
A straight is a hand where all 5 cards of consecutive ranks. 23456 is an example of a straight. In the event of a tie, the straight with the highest card is the winner.
2 pairs is a hand where you have 2 cards of one rank and 2 cards of another rank along with a final card of another rank. An example of 2 pairs might look like this: AAKK7.In the event of a tie, the hand with the highest pair wins.
1 pair is a hand where you 2 cards of one rank and 3 cards with different ranks. An example of a pair might look like this: JJ278. In the event of a tie, the higher ranked pair wins.
High card means a hand where none of the other hand rankings apply. If no one still in the hand can make a pair or better, the player with the highest card in his hand wins the pot.
Playing a live game of poker requires that you know this
hierarchy. For new players, this may seem a little daunting.
After all, here you have nine pieces of complex information to
remember in precise order.
A Word About Mnemonic Devices
I learned the order of poker hands using a mnemonic. I think
anyone can use this simple method to learn the hierarchy in a
matter of minutes. Mnemonics are popular memory devices used by
students, teachers, and people of all stripes for hundreds of
years in order to remember complex information.
You probably used a mnemonic device to remember the order of
the planets in our solar system. I remember learning the
sentence: “My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas.”
The first letter of each of the words in that sentence will help
you remember that the planets go in this order – Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. I’ll
probably never forget that fact, thanks to the mnemonic device I
was taught.
The trouble is, it’s hard to convert hand rankings into
words. Besides that, I don’t think you learn much about poker by
simply memorizing the order of hands. You should use the
opportunity of needing to learn proper hand hierarchy to improve
your understanding of poker strategy.
The tips below will help you understand the proper order of
poker hands better and introduce you to some basic poker
concepts to help you improve your overall game.
Low-Value Poker Hands
To remember the order of the four lowest-value hands, just
remember the number series “0, 1, 2, 3.”
- 0 means “high card.” Having nothing in your hand means
the value of your hand depends on the value of your highest
card. Remember – in poker, aces rank high, while 2’s rank
low. - 1 means “one pair.” Any hand that contains just a single
pair of cards and nothing else valuable is a 1. - 2 means “two pair.” This is a hand that contains two
pairs of cards. - 3 means “three-of-a-kind.” It’s the most valuable of the
low-value hands.
High-Value Poker Hands
For the purpose of this post, I’m calling every hand above a
three-of-a-kind a “high-value hand,” but lots of poker
strategists would consider a straight to be a low-value hand.
This is really a difference in philosophy and a language issue
more than anything else.
For that reason, and for simplicity’s sake, I like to think
of straight as a “/” symbol in my mnemonic. That means our
current mnemonic string goes: “0, 1, 2, 3, /.”
It’s easier to memorize the order of the other high-ranking
hands if you count the number of letters in the hand’s name.
It’s made all the easier to remember by the fact that the number
of letters increases as you move up the scale.
Here’s how I break it down:
- 5 – The word flush contains five letters.
- 9 – The words full house contain nine letters.
- 11 – The words four of a kind contain eleven letters.
- 13 – The words straight flush contain thirteen letters.
- 18 – The words royal straight flush contain eighteen
letters.
Putting them all together, our mnemonic is: “0 – 1 – 2 – 3 /
5 – 9 – 11 – 13 – 18.”
Other Ways to Memorize Hand Hierarchy
I’m not going to pretend that the method I used to learn hand
hierarchy is the only one that will work. The three ideas below
are the most popular tactics on the Web besides the use of
mnemonics, based on my research. You can use any of the four
methods described on this post to keep track of what hand beats
what other hand. That way, you’ll be able to plan your tactics
ahead of time and make smart bidding decisions.
Rote Memorization
Some people learn best by repeated drilling of the material
to be memorized. I’ve heard of actors reading their scripts over
and over, playing tapes of the script in their sleep, and
learning their lines by rote. I can’t think of any reason why
you shouldn’t try this method.
Texas Holdem Rank Of Hands Printable
Hand Evaluation Diagrams
Various poker trainer programs and strategy gurus have put
together diagrams to help you analyze your hand. You can use
these in poker rooms, and obviously you can use them online, so
long as you don’t care about the other guys at the table making
fun of you. They’re available for free with a simple Google
search.
Frequent Exposure
Texas Holdem Hands Rank In Order
The more rounds of poker you play, the more you’ll become
familiar with all the rules, including the rules of hand
ranking. You may lose a bunch on the way there, because of your
lack of familiarity with hand ranks, but, by God, you’ll get it
eventually.
Conclusion
Remember that some poker variations assign different values
to cards and hands. Some games are totally reversed, rewarding
the lowest-value hand instead of the highest-value one. Other
games may consider an Ace to be low, or use Jokers, which throws
off the hierarchy and strategy a bit.
Texas Hold'em Highest Hands
I hope that this page helped you learn about the value of the
cards you’re dealt. I believe the best way to practice your
newfound understanding of hand hierarchy is to get out there and
play a bunch of poker. If you’re still new to the game and not
yet comfortable with your understanding of hand rankings, you
can always play in free-to-play apps or use play-money at your
favorite online poker room.