Four Card Poker Hand Odds: Your Best 4 of 5, Exactly Counted
Last reviewed: July 2026
In Four Card Poker you’re dealt five cards and keep your best four. We enumerated all 2,598,960 possible deals: no simulation, every count exact. Here’s what your best-four actually looks like, hand by hand.
The exact frequencies
| Best 4-card hand | Count (of 2,598,960) | Probability | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four of a kind | 624 | 0.024% | 1 in 4,165 |
| Straight flush | 2,072 | 0.080% | 1 in 1,254 |
| Three of a kind | 58,656 | 2.26% | 1 in 44 |
| Flush | 114,616 | 4.41% | 1 in 23 |
| Straight | 101,808 | 3.92% | 1 in 26 |
| Two pair | 123,552 | 4.75% | 1 in 21 |
| Pair | 1,047,552 | 40.31% | 2 in 5 |
| High card only | 1,150,080 | 44.25% | a bit under half |
What jumps out
- The ranking has a genuine oddity. Three of a kind (2.26%) is the rarest of the middle hands, so it outranks both the flush and the straight, fair enough. But between those two, the standard Four Card Poker ranking puts the flush (4.41%) above the straight (3.92%) even though the straight is actually rarer. Unlike Three Card Poker, where rank tracks rarity exactly, this one is house convention, worth knowing cold so a showdown never surprises you.
- 44.25% of hands are no-pair, and under the simple strategy every one of them is a fold. Nearly half the game is correctly spent mucking.
- A pair of aces matters more than usual: on the Aces Up side bet, only 81,096 of the 1,047,552 pair hands, the ace pairs, actually pay. The other 966,456 “made” pairs lose the side bet.
Using the numbers
Raise 3× on a pair of tens or better (about 31% of hands), 1× on lower pairs (25%), fold the rest, that distribution comes straight from this table and yields the game’s 3.40% simple-strategy edge.
Watch your own frequencies converge on these exact figures; the free simulator deals as fast as you can click.