All ten hands, strongest to weakest, with the real odds of making each one.
Every form of poker that uses the standard hand ranks, Texas Hold'em, Omaha, seven-card stud, five-card draw, settles showdowns with the same ten-rung ladder. The best five-card hand wins. Suits never break a tie.
The 5-card column is the chance of being dealt that hand in five random cards, out of 2,598,960 possible hands. The Hold'em column is the chance your best five out of seven cards ends up as that hand, out of 133,784,560 combinations, so it assumes you see all five community cards. The two columns differ sharply because two extra cards make almost everything easier to hit. High card collapses from 50.12% to 17.4% for exactly that reason.
The ranking is not arbitrary. Each hand beats the one below it because it is harder to make. Read the 5-card column from the bottom up and it climbs steadily: half of all hands are high card, 4.75% are two pair, 0.144% are a full house, and four hands in 2.6 million are a royal flush. Rarity is the whole logic.
One quirk is worth knowing. In Hold'em the order still holds, but the gaps change shape. A straight (4.62%) and three of a kind (4.83%) sit almost on top of each other, and a flush becomes noticeably easier to make than a full house, which is why full houses beat flushes even though a flush uses five specific suited cards.
When two players make the same category of hand, the tie is settled inside that category, and suits are never used to break it.
Yes. A flush is harder to make than a straight, so it ranks higher. This is the single most common mix-up among new players.
Yes. A full house sits one rung above a flush.
Both, depending on the straight. An ace can be the top of a broadway straight (A-K-Q-J-10) or the bottom of a wheel (5-4-3-2-A). It cannot wrap around, so Q-K-A-2-3 is not a straight, it is just an ace-high hand.
A kicker is an unpaired side card used to break a tie. If you hold A-K and your opponent holds A-Q on an ace-high board, you both have a pair of aces, and your king kicker wins the pot.
Not in standard poker. Spades do not beat hearts. If two hands are genuinely identical, the pot is split. Some home games and tournament chip-draws use suit order, but that is a procedural rule for dealing, not for showdowns.
Pocket aces. Against a single random hand it wins about 85% of the time, and it stays the strongest starting hand at every table size, though its edge narrows as more players see the flop.
Knowing the ladder is the floor, not the ceiling. What separates winning players is reading a board fast and knowing what your hand is actually worth against the hands that keep betting. Try the odds calculator to see how any two hands run against each other, and the preflop charts to learn which of them are worth playing in the first place.
Poker Spot turns this into practice: study your own hands, drill preflop and postflop spots, and track every session so you can see which decisions are actually making you money.