How Many Possible Poker Hands Are There?
2,598,960 — that's every distinct five-card hand you can be dealt from a 52-card deck. And here's the elegant part: the famous poker hand ranking, from royal flush down to high card, is nothing more than that list sorted by how rare each hand is.
Poker hand explorer
The list runs in exact order of how many ways each hand can be made — rarest at the top. That, and nothing else, is why one hand beats another.
Hit "deal" a few times and you'll mostly get high card or a pair — the two most common hands by a mile. That commonness is exactly why they sit at the bottom.
The answer: 2,598,960
The count comes from a single combinatorial question: how many ways can you choose 5 cards from 52, when order doesn't matter? That's "52 choose 5," written C(52,5), and it works out to exactly 2,598,960 distinct hands.
Every one of those hands falls into one of ten categories, and crucially they're not evenly spread. There are just 4 royal flushes but over 1.3 million high-card hands. The whole game of ranking hands is really a game of counting how many ways each can occur.
The ranking is just the rarity list
People treat the hand ranking as tradition to be memorised, but it isn't arbitrary at all. Sort the ten hand types by how many ways each can be made and you get the rankings exactly, top to bottom: 4 royal flushes, 36 straight flushes, 624 four-of-a-kinds, 3,744 full houses, 5,108 flushes, 10,200 straights, and on down to 1,098,240 pairs and 1,302,540 high-card hands.
This settles the arguments people actually have at the table. A flush beats a straight because there are fewer flushes (5,108) than straights (10,200). A full house beats a flush because full houses (3,744) are rarer still. Every "does X beat Y" question has the same answer: whichever is harder to make wins.
What you’ll actually be dealt
The probabilities are humbling. On a straight five-card deal, you'll get high card or one pair about 92% of the time — those two categories alone account for nearly 2.4 million of the 2.6 million hands. Anything from two pair upward is the other ~8%.
At the top, the numbers turn vanishing. A flush comes once every ~509 hands, four of a kind once every 4,165, a straight flush once every ~72,000, and a royal flush just once in 649,740 deals. If you dealt yourself a fresh five-card hand every minute, you'd wait, on average, more than a year for a single royal flush.
Hold’em, 7 cards, and short decks
Most poker today is Texas Hold'em, where you make the best five-card hand out of seven (two in hand, five on the board). The number of possible seven-card combinations is far larger — 133,784,560, or C(52,7) — and because you get to pick the best five, strong hands appear more often. But the ranking order stays identical: it's still rarity that decides.
The cleanest proof that the ranking is pure counting comes from short-deck (six-plus) poker, played with the 2s through 5s removed — a 36-card deck. With fewer cards, flushes become harder to make than full houses, so in short-deck the rules flip a flush above a full house. The hierarchy isn't sacred tradition; change the deck and the maths re-sorts it.
Rarity, made into a rulebook
What looks like a memorised pecking order is really one of the neatest pieces of applied probability in everyday life. Nobody decreed that a flush should beat a straight; it falls out of the deck itself. The ranking is just 2,598,960 hands, counted and lined up.
It all rests on the deck you start with — the 52 cards in a standard deck. Pull four of them out, and poker quietly rewrites its own rules.
Common questions
Game: which hand wins?
Five matchups. Remember the rule the whole page is built on: the rarer hand always wins.
Which hand wins?
How the numbers work
- Total hands — C(52,5) = 2,598,960 distinct five-card hands.
- Frequencies (standard poker probability): royal flush 4, straight flush 36, four of a kind 624, full house 3,744, flush 5,108, straight 10,200, three of a kind 54,912, two pair 123,552, one pair 1,098,240, high card 1,302,540 — summing to 2,598,960.
- Seven-card combinations — C(52,7) = 133,784,560 (Texas Hold’em uses the best 5 of 7).
- Short-deck (six-plus) poker uses a 36-card deck, which makes flushes rarer than full houses and reverses their ranking.
More cards & games
2,598,960 hands, counted once — and the entire pecking order of poker falls out of the arithmetic.