A high card hand consists of five cards that don’t make a pair or any other kind of made hand. The lowest-ranking hand in the poker hand rankings, high card hands can only beat other high card hands.

Ace-high represents the strongest high card hand, while the lowest possible five-card high card hand is six-high. An example of a high card hand looks like this:

Use our poker hands reference chart until you are 100% certain of hand rankings. Poker hands from strongest to weakest Royal Flush: Five card sequence from 10 to the Ace in the same suit (10,J,Q,K,A). Three cards in sequence of the same suit. An Ace can count as either high or low. Poker Hand Combinations Explained. Poker hands fall into one of ten categories. Starting ranks and pot odds will be covered soon, but first up, learning the slightly different hand rankings is a must -if you don’t know what wins and loses you’re in big trouble! Because the game is only played with 36 cards instead of the traditional 52 (all the 2’s, 3’s, 4’s. Official poker rankings: ties and kickers. Poker is all about making the best five-card poker hand from the seven cards available (five community cards plus your own two hole cards). That means in the event of a tie with four of a kind, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, or high card, a side card, or 'kicker', comes into play to decide who wins the pot.

In a battle between two or more high card hands, the hand with the best high card wins. For example, A♠T♥8♦4♣2♣ beats K♠T♠8♥4♦2♥, as ace-high is stronger than king-high. If two high card hands go to battle at showdown and both have the same ranking top card, the second-highest card determines the winner.

How Does a High Card Hand Rank?

High card sits at the bottom of the poker hand rankings and loses to every other kind of made hand.

Wild Card Poker Hand Rankings

If you draw five random cards from a 52-card deck, you have a 50.1177% chance of ending up with just a high card hand. In other terms, about half of all five-card hands are high card hands.

3 Card Poker Hand Rankings

A standard 52-card deck yields 1,277 distinct ways to make a high card hand. Factoring in all possible suit combinations, there are 1,302,540 ways to draw a high-card hand from the deck.

In Texas Hold’em, you’re tasked with making the best five-card hand out of seven cards. With all five community cards on the board, you have a 17.4% chance of making a high card hand (4.74-to-1 odds against). One pair and two pair hands actually occur more often than high card hands in Texas Hold’em.

Four Card Poker Hand Rankings

Despite this fact, however, high card hands still lose to pairs, two pair, and everything else above it in the poker hand rankings.