What beats a flush?
A flush is beaten by a full house, four of a kind, a straight flush, and a royal flush.
What beats a flush?
A flush is a powerful hand and wins the large majority of showdowns, but it is not unbeatable. A handful of rarer hands sit above it on the rankings, and any one of them takes the pot when it appears. Knowing exactly which hands beat a flush tells you when to push and when to fold.
Try it yourself: use our free poker equity calculator to compare any two hands and see the exact odds.
Why
A flush is where a lot of players go broke, because it looks unbeatable — five matching suit symbols feels final — yet four hand types still outrank it: a full house, four of a kind, a straight flush, and the royal flush. The most common of those in practice is the full house, since paired boards and flush-heavy boards overlap more often than intuition suggests. A flush is dealt about once every 509 five-card hands, which is genuinely rare, but every hand above it on the chart is rarer still, and that is the entire basis for the ranking. A flush is also the hand most often mistaken for “the nuts” simply because it looks visually complete, when in fact three stronger categories can be sitting behind it completely unseen, patiently waiting for a confident bet to walk right into them.
Example
Your hand: A♠ J♠ 8♠ 5♠ 2♠ (a flush). An opponent turns over K♠ K♥ K♦ 7♣ 7♠ (a full house). Even though a full house is the weakest hand that outranks a flush, it still wins the pot.
A second example
Board: Q♠ 6♠ 6♦ T♠ T♣. Player A holds A♠ 9♠ and rivers an ace-high spade flush (A-Q-T-9-6). Player B holds 6♣ T♥ and makes tens full of sixes, a full house. The ace-high flush looks like the nuts on a three-flush board, but the full house was already built from the board’s two pairs.
In real play
Whenever a board pairs at the same time it shows three cards of one suit, do not assume the flush is best just because it is the more visible hand. Watch for opponents who called early streets calmly on a paired board — that pattern often means a set or trips is already brewing into a boat. See our flush guide for the full picture, or test the exact matchup in the equity calculator before betting big. A flush is still a hand worth betting for value in the vast majority of pots — the caution here applies mainly to boards where a pair and three suited cards show up together.
How each hand is built
Here is exactly what the hand requires to be made:
- Flush: five cards of one suit, not in sequence.
Odds and frequency
How often each hand is dealt in a random five-card poker hand (a rarer hand always outranks a more common one):
- Flush: 1 in 509
Full poker hand ranking
For reference, here are all ten hand categories from highest to lowest:
- Royal Flush
- Straight Flush
- Four of a Kind
- Full House
- Flush
- Straight
- Three of a Kind
- Two Pair
- One Pair
- High Card
Key takeaway
A common mistake is overvaluing a flush; it is a good hand, but always check the board for the stronger holdings that beat it before committing chips. When in doubt, work down the ranking chart from the top and the higher hand always takes the pot.
Read the full poker hand rankings chart, see our guides to Flush, or test any matchup in the poker equity calculator.
Full house vs flush, worked example. The highest hand in poker.
Related hand match-ups
