From High Card to Royal Flush

A friend told me about a kid who folded a full house at the poker table because she "had a good bluff going."

She was eight. Sunglasses on, playing with her dad and her two younger siblings. Whenever her cards were strong, she'd get quiet and pull her sunglasses down, without ever noticing she was doing it. One hand, she went quiet, pulled her glasses down, and then folded when her dad bet into her.

He asked what she had. A full house. One of the three strongest hands in poker, and she threw it in the muck because she thought "bluffing" meant hiding how good your cards were, not pretending they're better than they are.

That mix-up only makes sense once you know what a full house actually is, and why it beats almost everything else at the table. So before anything about betting or strategy, here is the ladder every poker hand is measured against.

The Two Building Blocks

Every poker hand you'll ever see is built from two ideas: matching ranks, and sequences.

• Matching ranks means cards that share a number or face, like two Kings or three 7s.
• Sequences means cards that run in unbroken order, like 5-6-7-8-9.

Ten hand types exist, and almost all of them are just combinations of those two ideas, stacked on top of each other. Weakest first.

No Match, Just High Card

If your five cards don't pair up and don't run in sequence, you're stuck comparing single cards. That's called high card, and it's the weakest hand in poker.

One step up is a pair, two cards of the same rank. Two steps up is two pair, which is exactly what it sounds like: two separate pairs sitting in the same hand.

Three matching cards is three of a kind, sometimes called "trips" when two of them are on the shared board, or a "set" when both are in your own hand. There's no clever etymology here either. Poker's naming is mostly just accurate description, which is part of why it's easy to learn once you stop expecting it to be complicated.

When Cards Run in Order: The Straight

A straight is five cards in unbroken rank order, regardless of suit. It's called a straight because the ranks run in one uninterrupted line, the same way you'd call a road straight if it never bent.

The Ace is flexible here. It can sit at the bottom of the ladder (A-2-3-4-5, nicknamed "the wheel") or the top (10-J-Q-K-A, "Broadway"). What it can't do is sit in the middle and let the sequence wrap around, so K-A-2-3-4 is not a straight. The Ace picks a side and stays there.

Same Suit, Any Order: The Flush

A flush is five cards of the same suit, in any order. The name comes from the old French flux, meaning "flow", the same root that gives us "fluent" and "influence." A flush is a hand where every card flows from the same suit, unbroken by any of the others.

A straight and a flush are both good on their own. Combine them, and you get one of the two hands nobody wants to see across the table from them, which I'll get to at the very end.

The Hand That Started This Whole Story: The Full House

A full house is three of a kind plus a pair, both at once. "Full" is doing real work in that name. Think of it the way you'd describe a packed theater as a "full house": every seat is taken, nothing is spare. In a full house, every single card is locked into a matching set. Nothing in your hand is just sitting there as a lone high card.

That's the hand the eight-year-old folded. It loses to only three things in the entire game: four of a kind, a straight flush, and a royal flush. If she'd stayed in, she would have won that pot against almost anything her dad could have shown her.

Four of a Kind

Four of a kind, or "quads," is all four copies of one rank plus a fifth, unrelated card. There are only thirteen ranks in a deck, so there are only thirteen possible four-of-a-kind hands in existence. That scarcity is exactly why it's ranked above a full house.

Straight Flush and Royal Flush

A straight flush is a straight where all five cards also share a suit, the sequence and the suit-match happening at once. It's the rarest hand you can be dealt without help from wild cards, and it beats everything below it outright.

Push that straight flush as high as it will go, and you land on ten, Jack, Queen, King, Ace, all one suit. That specific straight flush gets its own name: the royal flush. It's called "royal" because three of its five cards are exactly the court cards European playing-card decks reserve for royalty: the Jack, Queen, and King. The Ace, the highest-ranking card in the deck, completes the run sitting right above them.

There's no hand that beats a royal flush. If you ever hold one, the only thing left to worry about is whether the person across from you somehow has the exact same five cards in a different suit, which is the one way a royal flush can still lose.

Ranking a hand in isolation is one skill. Reading what your two cards turn into once the shared cards hit the table is a different one entirely, and that's where the actual game of Texas Hold'em begins.

The Essentials

1. Poker hands are built from two ideas: matching ranks (pair, two pair, trips, quads) and sequences (straight), or both at once (straight flush).
2. The ten hands, weakest to strongest: high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, royal flush.
3. A full house is called "full" because every card in it belongs to a matching set, nothing is a spare high card.
4. A flush's name comes from the old French word for "flow", all five cards flowing from one suit.
5. A royal flush is named for its face cards, Jack, Queen, King, plus the Ace as the highest rank, all in one suit and one unbroken run.
6. Bluffing means representing a hand stronger than what you have through betting, not folding a strong hand out of nerves.

Further Reading

• Book: The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky, the book most serious players point to for the math underneath hands like these.
• Wikipedia: List of poker hands · Texas hold 'em · Royal flush · Poker probability