SG777 Flush Poker: The Rank, the Odds and the Royal Flush

Flush poker questions usually come down to one moment: five cards of the same suit on your side of the table, and a doubt about whether they win. They often do. A flush sits fifth from the top of the nine hand ranks set out on the online poker pillar, above a straight and below a full house. The detail is in how flushes compare with each other, and in the games that move it up.

Flush poker ranking at a glance

The order follows rarity. Fewer full houses exist than flushes, so a full house wins; more straights exist than flushes, so the flush wins.

Counting the flushes

The arithmetic is short enough to check on paper:

1. One suit has 13 cards, and choosing 5 of them gives C(13,5) = 1,287 hands.
2. Four suits give 4 × 1,287 = 5,148 hands with all five cards in one suit.
3. Forty of those are in sequence: 10 straight flushes per suit, from 5-4-3-2-A up to A-K-Q-J-10.
4. That leaves 5,148 − 40 = 5,108 plain flushes, which is 1 in about 509 five-card deals.

In shared-card games you see seven cards rather than five, so a flush turns up more often by the river than these five-card odds suggest.

Royal flush meaning

A royal flush is the top straight flush: ace, king, queen, jack and ten of one suit. pagat.com notes that in standard poker it is simply the highest straight flush, with no separate category of its own. Four exist in a deck, so a five-card deal produces one 4 times in 2,598,960, or 1 in 649,740.

When two flushes meet

Suits never decide between two flushes in standard poker. Compare the cards from the top down, as on the poker cards ranking page:

1. Highest card first: an ace-high flush beats a king-high flush.
2. If the top cards match, compare the second card, then the third, and so on.
3. If all five ranks match, the hands are equal and split the pot.

pagat.com gives K-J-9-3-2 over K-J-7-6-5 as the worked case: the third card, nine against seven, settles it.

Games that move the flush

Not every table follows the standard order. pagat.com reports that in stripped-deck poker, played with the low cards removed in parts of continental Europe, a flush becomes harder to make and is sometimes ranked above a full house. The table shows which rule a game uses in its info panel, so read it before you bet on a flush.

Pusoy Dos treats flushes differently again: it compares them by suit first, then by top card. The Pusoy Dos combination order lays that out.

Mistakes with flushes

Poker for money in the Philippines is for players aged 21 and over.