:Individual card ranks are often used to evaluate hands that contain no pairs or other special combinations, or to rank the side cards of otherwise equal hands. The Ace is ranked low in ace-to-five and ace-to-six lowball games. |
:Individual card ranks are often used to evaluate hands that contain no pairs or other special combinations, or to rank the /Kickers of otherwise equal hands. The Ace is ranked low in ace-to-five and ace-to-six lowball games. |
These hands are called the traditional hands or high hands.
Some games called lowball or low poker are played where players strive not for the highest ranking of the above combinations but for the lowest ranking hand. There are three methods of ranking low hands, called /Ace-to-five low, /Deuce-to-seven low, and /Ace-to-six low. The ace-to-five method is most common.
Certain variants use hands of only three cards, either high or low. Three-card low hands can be ranked by any of the three methods above, although with three cards they become ace-to-three (rather than ace-to-five), deuce-to-five, and ace-to-four. The ace-to-three method is the most common, just as the ace-to-five method is most common method for five cards. Three-card high hands are ranked in one of two ways: either with or without straights and flushes. Without (which is the most common, and used such games as [Chinese poker]?), the hands are simply no pair, one pair, and three of a kind. If you add straights and flushes, the order of hands should be changed to reflect the correct probabilities: no pair, one pair, flush, straight, three of a kind, straight flush. This order is used, for example, in [Mambo stud]?.
Some poker games are played with a deck that has been stripped of certain cards, usually low-ranking ones. For example, the Australian game of /Manila? uses a 32-card deck in which all cards below the rank of 7 are removed, and [/Mexican stud]? removes the 8s, 9s, and 10s. In both of these games, a flush ranks above a full house, because having fewer cards of each suit available makes flushes rarer.
Some games add one or more [/Unconventional hand]?s, or have special exceptions to the rules above. For example, in the game of [Pai Gow Poker]? as played in Nevada, a /Wheel (5-4-3-2-A) ranks above a king-high straight, but below an ace-high straight. This is not the case in California, where the nearly identical game is played under the name [Double-hand poker]? using traditional hand values.
The following general rules apply to evaluating poker hands, whatever set of hand values are used.