What beats what
The rankings in order, and the rules that decide the hands where two people have the same thing.
The rankings
Strongest first. Suits never break a tie.
- 1A♠K♠Q♠J♠10♠Royal FlushTen to ace, all one suit. The best hand there is — a straight flush at the top of the ranks.
- 29♠8♠7♠6♠5♠Straight FlushFive in a row, all one suit.
- 3Q♥Q♦Q♣Q♠3♥Four of a KindAll four of a rank. The fifth card only breaks a tie between two of these.
- 4J♥J♦J♣8♠8♥Full HouseThree of a rank plus a pair. The three decide it first, then the pair.
- 5A♥J♥8♥5♥2♥FlushFive of one suit, in any order. The highest card wins between two flushes.
- 610♠9♥8♦7♣6♠StraightFive in a row, suits mixed. Ace plays low in 5-4-3-2-A, and that is the worst straight.
- 77♥7♦7♠K♣4♦Three of a KindThree of a rank, with two unrelated cards.
- 8A♥A♦9♠9♣2♥Two PairTwo different pairs. The higher pair is compared first.
- 9K♥K♦10♠6♣3♥One PairTwo cards of the same rank, with three unrelated cards.
- 10A♥Q♦9♠7♣4♥High CardNothing above. The highest card decides it, then the next, and so on.
The same chart is a tap away at the table, so there is nothing here to memorise.
Only five cards count
You hold seven. Two of them are always thrown away.
Your two cards plus the five on the board make seven, and your hand is the best five you can build from them. The other two are simply ignored — they cannot help, and they cannot break a tie either.
You are free to use both of your cards, one of them, or neither. Using neither is called playing the board, and it is worth knowing about, because it is the one situation where a hand you thought was strong turns out to be shared by everybody.
Kickers
When two hands are the same, the cards beside them decide it.
A kicker is a card that is not part of the combination but is still one of your five. Compare hands of the same category by their main cards first, then by each kicker in turn, highest to lowest, until one is bigger. If all five match exactly, the pot is split.
This is why two big cards are worth more than one big card and one small one. The hand you make will often be the same as somebody else’s, and then it is decided by whatever you brought with it.
How the ace works
High almost always, low in exactly one place.
- Normally it is the highest card — above the king, so A-K-Q-J-10 is the best straight and an ace-high flush beats every other flush.
- It plays low only in 5-4-3-2-A, the straight known as the wheel. Here the ace counts as one, and the straight is judged by its top card — the five. It is the weakest straight there is, and it loses to 6-5-4-3-2.
- It never wraps around. K-A-2-3-4 is not a straight, it is ace-high nothing. A straight has to run in one direction.
Ties, and the hands that surprise people
Chopped pots are ordinary, not a bug.
When two hands are genuinely identical across all five cards the pot is split evenly. If it cannot be divided exactly, the odd chip goes to the first winner clockwise from the dealer button — so nothing is ever invented or lost.
- Suits are never a tie-breaker. There is no ranking of spades over hearts anywhere in Hold’em. Two identical hands in different suits chop.
- A sixth card cannot rescue you. If the board pairs four of a kind and you both play the same ace as the fifth card, your other hole card is irrelevant however big it is.
- A flush beats a straight, and three of a kind beats two pair — both of which look wrong until you count how much rarer each one is.
- A royal flush is not its own hand. It is just the highest possible straight flush. Every chart lists it separately because people look for it, but nothing in the rules treats it as a category of its own.