SG777 Poker Cards: What Is in the Deck and How It Ranks

Poker cards are the standard 52-card deck, nothing more exotic: four suits, thirteen ranks each, and no jokers unless a home game adds them. Every hand on the online poker page is built from five of these cards, so knowing the deck by heart is the quickest way to read a showdown. Here is how the cards are made up, how they order, and the few moments a suit ever matters.

What a 52-card set of poker cards contains

The deck is a grid of 4 suits by 13 ranks, which gives 52 cards:

pagat.com’s history of French-suited cards says the four familiar suits were introduced by French cardmakers in the late fifteenth century, and that their simple shapes made the cards easier and cheaper to print than the older Latin, German and Swiss systems. The same four suits are what every screen table draws.

How the thirteen ranks order

From high to low, pagat.com lists the ranks as ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. Read a hand by its pattern first and its ranks second:

1. Decide which of the nine categories the five cards make, from straight flush down to high card.
2. If two hands share a category, compare the ranks that form the pattern, the pair or the triple, first.
3. If those match, compare the remaining cards one at a time from the highest down.

pagat.com’s own example: 6-6-4-3-2 beats 5-5-A-K-Q, because the sixes outrank the fives before the ace is even looked at.

When the ace plays low

The ace has one double life. It is the top card, yet it may also go below the two to make the lowest straight, 5-4-3-2-A, which players call the wheel. pagat.com is clear that it cannot do both at once, so 2-A-K-Q-J is not a straight at all.

Suits: tie-breaker or not?

In standard poker the suits carry no rank when hands are compared. pagat.com explains that two hands identical apart from suits are equal, and the pot is split. It also notes that formal rules still keep a suit order, spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, for a few side jobs.

Those side jobs, in pagat.com’s list:

1. Drawing cards to seat players.
2. Deciding who bets first in stud by the highest or lowest upcard.
3. Awarding the odd chip when a pot cannot be shared exactly.

Other games use suits for real. The Pusoy Dos combinations page shows a Philippine game where suits break ties on every play.

How many hands the deck can make

Choosing 5 cards from 52 can be done in 2,598,960 ways, which is C(52,5) = 52 × 51 × 50 × 49 × 48 ÷ 120. Split by suit, a single suit can make C(13,5) = 1,287 five-card hands, and four suits give 5,148 hands all in one suit. The flush poker odds page takes that number apart to show how many of them are plain flushes.

Reading cards on a small phone screen

Players must be 21 or older to play for money in the Philippines.