Dealt five random cards, you get no pair at all just over half the time and a royal flush once in 649,740 deals. Play a hold’em hand to the river, where you choose the best five of seven cards, and you make a pair or better about 83 percent of the time. This page is the full table, exact, plus the handful of numbers worth carrying into a live hand.
The full probability table
| Hand | Dealt 5 cards | Odds against (5-card) | By the river (7 cards) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 0.0002% | 649,739-to-1 | 0.003% |
| Straight flush | 0.0014% | 72,192-to-1 | 0.028% |
| Four of a kind | 0.024% | 4,164-to-1 | 0.17% |
| Full house | 0.14% | 693-to-1 | 2.6% |
| Flush | 0.20% | 508-to-1 | 3.0% |
| Straight | 0.39% | 254-to-1 | 4.6% |
| Three of a kind | 2.1% | 46-to-1 | 4.8% |
| Two pair | 4.8% | 20-to-1 | 23.5% |
| One pair | 42.3% | 1.4-to-1 | 43.8% |
| High card | 50.1% | 1-to-1 | 17.4% |
The 5-card column describes a raw deal: five cards, no choices. The 7-card column describes hold’em reality: your best five from two hole cards plus five board cards. Both columns are exact combinatorics, not simulations.
Why the two columns differ
Seven cards give you twenty-one ways to choose five, and you always keep the best one, so every hand above high card gets more common while high card collapses from half of all deals to about a sixth. The biggest beneficiary is two pair, five times more likely by the river than in a raw deal, because seven cards offer so many ways to pair twice. The ladder’s order never changes for the made hands; what changes is how reachable each rung becomes. That is also why the hand rankings are what they are: the ladder tracks five-card rarity, and a flush stays above a straight even though hold’em makes both far more reachable.
The rarity ladder, walked
Start at the bottom and climb. Half of everything is nothing: unpaired high card is the most common five-card hand in poker, which is why ace-high wins real pots. A pair is nearly the other half. From there, each rung roughly divides the world by ten or more: two pair at one deal in 21, trips at one in 47, a straight at one in 255, a flush at one in 509, a full house at one in 694. Then the cliff: four of a kind at one in 4,165, a straight flush at one in 72,193, and the royal at one deal in 649,740. A player who sees thirty hands an hour would wait, on average, about a decade of full-time play to be dealt a royal in five cards; by the river in hold’em it arrives about once per 31,000 hands, which is why most regulars have seen one and few have held one.
Before the flop: what you get dealt
The same combinatorics govern your starting hand, and three preflop numbers frame everything else. You are dealt a pocket pair once in 17 hands, 5.9 percent, which is why sets are precious: rare to start, then only a 12 percent flop. A specific pair like aces arrives once in 221 hands, roughly once every seven hours of full-ring live play, which is worth remembering the next time someone “always has it”: across a long night, somebody at the table probably did. And two suited cards arrive 24 percent of the time, which sounds promising until the 6.4 percent flush-completion number below deflates it. Preflop rarity is the quiet argument for patience: the premium holdings are genuinely scarce, and playing as if they were common is paying for a distribution the deck never promised.
Three numbers worth memorizing
The table is a reference; three of its consequences are working tools. First, 83 percent: by the river you make a pair or better most of the time, but more than half of those hands are just one pair, which is why “I have something” is not a plan. Second, 12 percent: a pocket pair flops a set or better about one time in 8.5, the number that governs every set-mining call. Third, 6.4 percent: two suited hole cards make a flush by the river one time in 16, the number that quietly kills “any two suited” as a preflop philosophy. Everything else you can look up between hands.
When these numbers lie to you
Probabilities describe deals, not showdowns. The hands that reach a river and a big bet are a filtered set: nobody triple-barrels into a made flush with a random distribution, so the frequency of “flush by the river” and the frequency of “flush, given that someone just check-raised the river” are different animals, and the second one is much higher. Frequency is also not equity: how often a hand arrives says nothing about how often it wins once it gets there, on that board, against that range. And the table assumes full runouts; folding preflop, which you do most of the time, means the by-the-river column describes the hands you chose to play, not the hands you were dealt.
A live-play pattern
Mid-hand, the table’s job is translation, not trivia. When you catch yourself thinking “a flush is unlikely,” convert the thought into outs and a price instead: nine outs, roughly 35 percent from the flop by the rule of 2 and 4, against whatever the pot is charging. The static probabilities on this page tell you what the deck does on average; outs-and-price tells you what this hand is worth right now, and only the second one moves chips correctly.
Where this fits
This page owns the how-often question. The rankings chart walks what-beats-what with examples, the hand rankings hub holds the ladder itself, and the two rarest rungs get their own full treatments in the royal flush odds article and the full house article. Between them, every “how rare is…” and “who wins…” question has one canonical home.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common poker hand? In a raw five-card deal, high card, at just over 50 percent. By the river in hold’em, one pair, at about 44 percent of hands.
What are the odds of a royal flush? One in 649,740 for a five-card deal; about one in 31,000 by the river in hold’em when you count all seven cards. Either way it is the rarest hand in the game.
How rare is four of a kind? One five-card deal in 4,165, and about one river in 595 in hold’em. Most sessions end without anyone showing quads.
Do more players at the table change these odds? Not for your own hand; the deck does not care how many people are seated. What changes is the chance that someone holds a big hand, which rises with every player dealt in, and that is the number your bluffs and thin value bets should respect.