Three Card Poker Hand Odds: Straight Flush to Pair, Exactly
Last reviewed: July 2026
Three cards from a 52-card deck make exactly 22,100 possible hands — few enough that every probability in this game is exact, no simulation required. Here’s the complete breakdown, and the two rankings that trip everyone up.
The exact frequencies
| Hand | Combinations | Probability | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Straight flush | 48 | 0.217% | 1 in 460 |
| Three of a kind | 52 | 0.235% | 1 in 425 |
| Straight | 720 | 3.26% | 1 in 31 |
| Flush | 1,096 | 4.96% | 1 in 20 |
| Pair | 3,744 | 16.94% | 1 in 5.9 |
| High card only | 16,440 | 74.39% | 3 in 4 |
Three-quarters of your hands are nothing at all. A pair arrives about once every six hands; the premium hands — trips and straight flushes — show up a couple of times in a long session, combined odds about 1 in 221.
The ranking quirk these numbers force
Notice the table’s order: a straight (720 hands) is rarer than a flush (1,096) — so in Three Card Poker, a straight beats a flush, the reverse of five-card poker. Rarity sets rank. Same logic makes trips nearly as rare as a straight flush; that’s why the Pair Plus table pays 30:1 for them.
Also note the ace works both ways in straights: A-K-Q is the highest, A-2-3 (“the wheel”) the lowest.
What the odds mean for your bets
- Ante-Play: you’ll hold Q-6-4 or better about 67% of the time — that’s every hand worth playing under the optimal rule.
- Pair Plus: it wins on pair-or-better, which the table shows is only 25.6% of hands. Three losses out of four is the baseline experience — budget accordingly.
Deal a few hundred hands and watch these exact frequencies assemble themselves — the free simulator tracks every one.