Brian Alspach

13 January 2000

The denominator for everything is 52C5 = 2,598,960. Here are the calcs for the numerators: 40 - Straight flush: There are ten different ranks (from the 'wheel'; A2345 up to the "royal" 10JQKA) and four suits - that's 40 different hands. Wild cards introduce multiple evaluations for a given hand, and the best standard evaluation for any given hand is used in the tables. Data from this page may be freely used provided it includes an acknowledgement to the author. 6 card poker probabilities if there are no wild cards (Computer program and data by Bill Butler) Poker Hand Nbr.

Abstract:

The types of 3-card poker hands are

• straight flush
• 3-of-a-kind
• straight
• flush
• a pair
• high card

The total number of 3-card poker hands is .

A straight flush is completely determined once the smallest card in thestraight flush is known. There are 48 cards eligible to be the smallestcard in a straight flush. Hence, there are 48 straight flushes.

In forming a 3-of-a-kind hand, there are 13 choices for the rank and4 choices for the 3 cards of the given rank. This implies there are3-of-a-kind hands.

The ranks of the cards in a straight have the form x,x+1,x+2, wherex can be any of 12 ranks. There are then 4 choices for each card ofthe given ranks. This yields total choices. However,this count includes the straight flushes. Removing the 48 straightflushes leaves us with 720 straights.

To count the number of flushes, we obtain choicesfor 3 cards in the same suit. Of these, 12 are straight flushes whoseremoval leaves 274 flushes of a given suit. Multiplying by 4 produces1,096 flushes.

Now we count the number of hands with a pair. There are 13 choices forthe rank of the pair, and pairs of the chosen rank.The non-pair card can be any of the remaining 48. Thus, thereare 3-card hands with a single pair.

We could determine the number of high card hands by removing the handswhich have already been counted in one of the previous categories.Instead, let us count them independently and see if the numbers sumto 22,100 which will serve as a check on our arithmetic.

A high card hand has 3 distinct ranks, but does not allow ranks of theform x,x+1,x+2 as that would constitute a straight. Thus, there arepossible sets of ranks from which we remove the12 sets of the form .This leaves 274 sets of ranks.For a given set of ranks, there are 4 choices for each cardexcept we cannot choose all in the same suit. Hence, there are274(4³-4) = 16,440 high card hands.

If we sum the preceding numbers, we obtain 22,100 and we can be confidentthe numbers are correct.

Here is a table summarizing the number of 3-card poker hands. Theprobability is the probability of having the hand dealt to you whendealt 3 cards.

Rules Of Card Games: Poker Hand Probabilities

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