Card dealer

How the cards are dealt

Poker uses a standard deck of 52 cards: thirteen ranks (from two to ace) in four suits. Before dealing, the deck is shuffled — in the simulator, this is done by a cryptographic generator on the server, so the order of the cards cannot be predicted from previous hands.

Each player receives two hole cards, then five community cards are dealt on the table: first the flop (three cards), then the turn (fourth) and the river (fifth). Before the flop, turn, and river, one card is burned — it does not participate in the game. That is why at a table of nine players, 18 + 5 + 3 = 26 cards are used, and 26 remain in the deck.

The winner is determined by the best combination of five cards that can be made from two of your own and five community cards. The evaluator on this page goes through all 21 options of five cards from seven and compares them by rank — taking into account kickers and the possibility of a tie.

Why are there exactly 52 cards in a deck

Four suits with thirteen ranks give 52 unique cards. The number of possible starting hands is 1,326 two-card combinations: C(52, 2) = 52 × 51 / 2. Of these, 78 are pocket pairs, 312 are suited, and 936 are offsuit.

Probabilities of starting hands

Probabilities are calculated from 1326 equally likely starting combinations.