English

Big Two and n-card poker probabilities

History and Overview 2024-06-14 v1

Abstract

Between the poker hands of straight, flush, and full house, which hand is more common? In standard 5-card poker, the order from most common to least common is straight, flush, full house. The same order is true for 7-card poker such as Texas hold'em. However, is the same true for n-card poker for larger n? We study the probability of obtaining these various hands for n-card poker for various values of n5n\geq 5. In particular, we derive equations for the probability of flush, straight and full house and show that the probability of flush is less than a straight when n11n\leq 11, and is more than a straight when n>11. Similarly, we show that the probability of full house is less than a straight when n19n\leq 19, and is more than a straight when n>19. This means that for games such as Big Two where the ordering of 13-card hands depends on the ordering in 5-card poker, the ranking ordering does not follow the occurrence probability ordering, contrary to what intuition suggests.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.00011,
  title  = {Big Two and n-card poker probabilities},
  author = {Brian Wu and Chai Wah Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.00011},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, 3 program listings

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:09:39.364Z