Question of the Day - 24 October 2025

This question gets right to the heart of why poker hands are ranked the way they are.

Poker rankings are determined by the relative probability of each type of hand occurring in a random 5-card combination from a 52-card deck. The rarer the hand, the stronger it is, as this balances the odds and payouts.

At first glance, it seems like a straight and a flush should be about equal, since when you’re drawing, the straight often has 8 outs and the flush 9, as you state in the question. But hand rankings aren’t based on how easy they are to complete from a draw; they’re based on how often the final 5-card hands actually occur. 

Here’s the breakdown. In a 52-card deck, there are a total of 2,598,960 possible 5-card poker hands. Out of those, you can make a straight (other than a straight flush) 10,200 ways and a flush (again, other than a straight flush) 5,108 ways. So flushes are about half as likely as straights, which accounts for their higher ranking.

Also, straights come in more ways (13 ranks × 10 sequences × multiple suits), while flushes are more restricted, 5 of the same suit.

So even though a flush draw sometimes looks slightly better than a straight draw, a flush beats a straight because flushes occur less often than straights among all 5-card hands.