The strength of a hand is increased by having multiple cards of the same rank, all the cards being from the same suit, or having all the cards with consecutive values. The position of the various possible hands is based on the probability of being randomly dealt such a hand from a well-shuffled deck.

General rules

The following general rules apply to evaluating poker hands, whatever set of hand values are used.

• Individual cards are ranked A (high), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, A. Aces only appear low when part of an A-2-3-4-5 straight or straight flush. Individual card ranks are used to compare hands that contain no pairs or other special combinations, or to compare the kickers of otherwise equal hands. The ace plays low only in ace-to-five and ace-to-six lowball games, and plays high only in deuce-to-seven lowball.
• Suits have no value. The suits of the cards are mainly used in determining whether a hand fits a certain category (specifically the flush and straight flush hands). In most variants, if two players have hands that are identical except for suit, then they are tied and split the pot (so does not beat ). Sometimes a ranking called high card by suit is used for randomly selecting a player to deal. Low card by suit usually determines the bring-in bettor in stud games.
• A hand always consists of five cards. In games where more than five cards are available to each player, the best five-card combination of those cards plays.
• Hands are ranked first by category, then by individual card ranks: even the lowest qualifying hand in a certain category defeats all hands in all lower categories. The smallest two pair hand ( ), for example, defeats all hands with just one pair or high card]]. Only between two hands in the same category are card ranks used to break ties.

Standard ranking

For ease of recognition, poker hands are usually presented with the most important cards on the left, with cards descending in importance towards the right. However, a poker hand still has the same value however it is arranged. There are 311,875,200 ways (permutations) of being dealt five cards from a 52 card deck,The general form of permutations is

$P(n,\; r)\; =\; \backslash frac\{n!\}\{(n-r)!\}.$

thus:

P(52,5) =
\frac {52!} {(52-5)!} =
\frac {52!}{47!} =
311,875,200

but since the order of cards does not matter there are $\backslash frac\; \backslash frac\; \{52!\}\{(52-5)!\}\{5!\}\; =\; \backslash frac\; \{311,875,200\}\{5!\}\; =\; \backslash frac\; \{311,875,200\}\{120\}\; =\; 2,598,960$ possible distinct hands (combinations).

Straight flush

A straight flush is a poker hand which contains five cards in sequence, all of the same suit, such as . Two such hands are compared by their highest card; since suits have no relative value, two otherwise identical straight flushes tie (so ties with ). Aces can play low in straights and straight flushes: is a 5-high straight flush, also known as a "steel wheel". An ace-high straight flush such as is known as a royal flush, and is the highest ranking standard poker hand.