YG777 Royal Flush: Odds, Ranking and the Straight Flush Below It

A royal flush is the best hand in poker: the ace, king, queen, jack and ten of a single suit. Nothing outranks it, and nothing can tie it unless the five cards are shared on the board. This page gives the count behind its rarity, the ladder of hands around it and the one distinction people mix up: where a royal stops and an ordinary straight flush begins. To see where card tables sit in the lobby, start from the card games online hub for the poker family.

How many five-card hands exist

A standard deck holds 52 cards, and the number of five-card hands is the number of ways to choose 5 from 52.

1. 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 = 311,875,200 ordered deals.
2. Divide by 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120 orderings of the same five cards.
3. 311,875,200 / 120 = 2,598,960 distinct hands.

Every probability on this page is a count of hands divided by 2,598,960.

Royal flush odds

There is exactly one royal flush per suit and four suits, so there are 4 royal flushes. Odds are 4 / 2,598,960, which is 1 in 649,740, or about 0.00015% of hands. If you were dealt a five-card hand every minute without a break, the average wait would be about 451 days.

Hold’em seven-card hands raise the chance, because you pick the best five of seven cards. The shape of the odds stays the same: a royal flush is a once-in-a-lifetime hand for most players. That is why rewards for it in poker-style table games are the headline, and why a game’s own paytable window is where you read the figure, never a guess.

Straight flush: the hand right below

A straight flush is five cards in sequence, all of one suit. Count the sequences by their lowest card: A-2-3-4-5 up to 10-J-Q-K-A gives 10 starting points, and 4 suits makes 40 straight flushes. Of those 40, 4 are royal flushes, so 36 are straight flushes that are not royal.

36 / 2,598,960 is 1 in 72,193, so a plain straight flush is about nine times as common as a royal flush. When two straight flushes meet, the higher top card wins: K-Q-J-10-9 beats 9-8-7-6-5, and a royal beats them all.

The next hand down the ladder has its own page: full house poker, three places below.

Royal flush against the other nine hands

Poker ranks nine hand types under the royal flush, and each one is the count of hands that fit its pattern. The complete ladder, from rarest to commonest, with every row from the same deck:

1. Royal flush: 4
2. Straight flush: 36
3. Four of a kind: 624
4. Full house: 3,744
5. Flush: 5,108
6. Straight: 10,200
7. Three of a kind: 54,912
8. Two pair: 123,552
9. One pair: 1,098,240
10. High card: 1,302,540

Add them and you land on 2,598,960 again, which is the check that nothing is missing. The flush row is 5,148 five-card flushes minus the 40 that are straight flushes, and the straight row is 10,240 minus the same 40.

Where a royal flush matters at the table

In a dealer-versus-player game the royal flush is the hand the paytable rewards most. In Ultimate Texas Holdem against the dealer, a made hand is judged against the dealer’s, and the game’s own rules window lists what each strong hand pays. For a royal, a straight flush or any other, open the game, press its rules, and read the table that game shows.

To find a poker-style table in the lobby:

1. Open Poker or Live from the menu.
2. Look through the studio tiles for the game by name.
3. Open its rules window and read the hand table.

Players must be 21 or over, and a stake you cannot lose is a stake you should not place.