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.