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A royal flush is ace, king, queen, jack and ten, all of the same suit. It is the highest hand in poker and nothing beats it — there is no hand above it and no tie-breaker below it, because the five cards are fixed. In Texas Hold'em you will make one roughly once every 30,940 hands, which at a normal home game pace is once every few years of Friday nights. Pick it in the tool below and put anything you like against it; the verdict never changes.
What a royal flush is, in one line, with the exact five cards
Real Hold'em odds — 1 in 30,940, not the five-card draw figure
What happens when the board itself makes one
What beats what
Rank 1 of 10
A-K-Q-J-10, same suit
Rank 2 of 10
Five in a row, same suit
Royal Flush beats Straight Flush. The stronger hand class always wins, whatever the cards inside it are.
There are exactly four, one per suit, and no suit outranks another in Hold'em. That is the whole list — every royal flush ever dealt is one of these four hands.
Suit
Spades
The hand
A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ T♠
Beats
Everything
Loses to
Nothing
Suit
Hearts
The hand
A♥ K♥ Q♥ J♥ T♥
Beats
Everything
Loses to
Nothing
Suit
Diamonds
The hand
A♦ K♦ Q♦ J♦ T♦
Beats
Everything
Loses to
Nothing
Suit
Clubs
The hand
A♣ K♣ Q♣ J♣ T♣
Beats
Everything
Loses to
Nothing
The percentage is how often that is the best five-card hand you can make from seven cards — your two hole cards plus the five on the board. A royal flush is roughly nine times rarer than a straight flush and 174 times rarer than four of a kind.
Hand
Royal flush
How often
0.0032%
Roughly once every
30,940 hands
Hand
Straight flush
How often
0.0279%
Roughly once every
3,591 hands
Hand
Four of a kind
How often
0.168%
Roughly once every
595 hands
Hand
Full house
How often
2.60%
Roughly once every
39 hands
Hand
Flush
How often
3.03%
Roughly once every
33 hands
Hand
Straight
How often
4.62%
Roughly once every
22 hands
Five cards — ace, king, queen, jack, ten — all in the same suit. It is technically just the highest possible straight flush, and most rule books define it that way rather than giving it its own rank. Nothing in poker beats it, which makes it the only hand you can hold and know for certain you cannot lose. If you are looking at one, the only question left is how to get paid.
In Texas Hold'em, where you make your best five cards out of seven, a royal flush turns up about once in every 30,940 hands. A nine-handed home game plays perhaps thirty hands an hour, so the table as a whole sees one roughly every 115 hours of play — but for any one player it is once in several thousand hours. The five-card draw figure quoted on most charts, 1 in 649,740, is a different game with two fewer cards and does not apply here.
Almost every royal flush starts as two broadway cards of the same suit. AKs, AQs, KQs, KJs and the rest are the only hole cards that can build one without three specific cards on the board. Holding two of the five, you need the other three to arrive in exactly the right ranks and suit, which is why the odds stay enormous even from a promising start. The reason people remember chasing one is that the draw looks close — four to a royal on the turn is one card away, and that one card is one of 46.
Because the five cards are fixed, two players can only both have a royal flush if all five of the cards making it are on the board. That is a real occurrence — if the community cards are A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ T♠, everyone still in the hand plays the board and everyone chops. What cannot happen is a royal flush being beaten by another royal flush. In Hold'em suits do not break ties, so the only outcomes are one winner or an even split.
The mistake is the obvious one: betting so much that everyone folds. A royal flush is worth precisely what your opponent will put in, so play it like the strong-but-beatable hand you would otherwise represent. If somebody bets, call or raise the amount they would call, not the amount you want to win. The exception is a board where the royal is visible — four to the royal showing means nobody with a brain pays you — in which case take whatever is in the middle and be glad of it.
Some cardrooms and some home games run a bonus for a royal flush, usually paid from a rake or a side pot everyone contributes to. The usual condition is that both hole cards play, which rules out the case where the board makes it for everybody. If your home game runs one, write the condition down before somebody hits it rather than after; arguing about whether a board royal counts, at two in the morning, with money on the table, goes exactly as well as you would expect.
Top of the list, above the straight flush, four of a kind, the full house, the flush, the straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair and high card. That order is fixed in every form of Texas Hold'em and never changes for the number of players, the stakes or the house. If your game uses a different order for anything, the disagreement is worth settling before the first deal — the rankings page has the full list in one screen.
The hand people talk about for years is rarely the one anybody wrote down. If you run your game in a room on PokerChip.live, the chip movement and the result are recorded as they happen, so the pot that royal flush won is a number in the history rather than three different memories of it. It also settles the more common argument, which is not about the hand at all but about who owes what at the end of the night.
FAQ
01
Ace, king, queen, jack and ten, all of the same suit. It is the highest hand in poker and nothing beats it.
02
About 1 in 30,940 in Texas Hold'em, where you use the best five of seven cards. The 1 in 649,740 figure quoted on many charts is for five-card draw and does not apply to Hold'em.
03
Yes, comfortably. Four of a kind is the third-strongest hand; a royal flush is the strongest. Nothing in the deck beats it.
04
No. Suits have no rank in Texas Hold'em. If two players somehow both hold a royal flush — only possible when all five cards are on the board — the pot is split.
05
It is the highest one. A straight flush is five suited cards in sequence; when that sequence is ten through ace it is called a royal flush and no other straight flush beats it.
06
Yes. If all five community cards are the royal flush, every remaining player plays the board and the pot is chopped between them. Home game bonuses usually require both of your hole cards to play, which excludes this case.
07
Four — one for each suit. That is the complete list of possible royal flushes in a standard 52-card deck.
08
A straight flush: five suited cards in a row that stop short of the royal. The best of them is king-high — K Q J T 9 of one suit — and it loses to nothing except a royal flush.
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