Basic IDN Play uses a standard deck of playing cards. The deck consists of 52 total cards, broken into four suits: clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. Each suit has 13 cards, ranked in order of precedence, consisting of an Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2. Many decks have Jokers as well, but they are not generally used except in wild-card variants.
Ace through Jack are known as “face cards” because they usually depict a figure with a face. Some say the Joker is also a face card, but since it is a card that is little used, it hardly matters. In some games, the Ace is of lower value than the 2, or can go high and/or low.
The simplest form of traditional poker has a hand of five cards. It is called simply 5 card draw poker. Back in the day, this was known as California IDN Play, though you don’t hear that term much anymore. There are literally hundreds of different kinds of poker games, some of them employing less cards, many of them (like Texas Hold Em) employing more. Players try to get the best poker hand possible, starting with what they are dealt and then through either discard and draw, or by other means such as the common cards available to all in Texas Hold Em.
In some games, wild cards are used, making it easier to achieve certain hands. However, experienced players and pros tend not to like wild card games. This is because wild cards drastically change the probabilities in a game, and probabilities are what good players use to assess where they are at during play, what they should do and the chance of winning.
The poker hands described below are ranked in order of precedence as found in most IDN Play games, from best to worst. The top listed, the Royal Flush, the ultimate hand and one which is rarely seen because of the extremely low probability of having the right cards in the right sequence. Some players go for years before getting one. It is the best poker hand that can be achieved in standard forms of the game. The weakest hand (other than simply having the highest card shown) is One Pair. Keep in mind that in some variants — like Hi-Lo — low ranking hands can also win or tie.
For the purpose of this introduction, we will discuss the standard hand ranking that is used throughout the world, and the chance of getting certain hands based on a five card hand. The probability percentage shows the likelihood of being dealt such a hand from a well-shuffled deck in standard five card poker. The chances of getting a particular hand are approximations, to keep them more memorable. The actual chance of getting a Royal Flush is 1 in 649,740 — but who wants to try and remember that? Understand that the probabilities of certain combinations coming up in the various poker variant games depends on several factors, from hand size to number of players, whether the deck is ‘fresh” or not and how many cards have already been discarded or are unshuffled, etc..
Hands are ranked here in order of precedence, from the best poker hands at the top to the worst at the bottom. NOTE: In the case of ties by type, the highest card determines the winner. For instance, if two players had Flushes, one with a high card of a Queen and the other with a high card of a 10, the “Queen high” Flush would win.
