Most Famous Poker Hands

1. Most Famous Poker Hands Wins
2. Most Famous Poker Hands Clip Art
3. Most Famous Poker Hands Held
4. Most Famous Poker Hands Game

As an avid poker fan and PokerGO subscriber, we don’t need to tell you who the best and most famous poker pros are, but what if you’re new to the game of poker? What if you’re looking for a way to learn how to play No Limit Holdem? Or what if you just want to know more about who to keep an eye on as you’re watching the highest stakes tournaments and cash games? Well, we’re breaking it all down for you right here!

Poker became a game for celebrities long before celebrities became good at poker, but then the notion of putting down your money and turning those poker chips has been the ambition of famous poker players since the first cards were dealt.

But who are the most famous poker players and what makes them the most famous poker players in history? Is it their celebrity, WSOP bracelets wins or notoriety at the felt? We search for the most world-famous poker player to define fame within the game for anyone that’s new to the game poker and its endless list of fascinating characters and personalities!

These famous outlaws ruled the American frontier. At the time of his death, he was purportedly holding two pairs of black aces and eights, now known as the dead man's hand in poker. The Doyle Brunson Hand may have the best history of all and it’s become arguably the most famous hand in poker. The actual origins of the 10-2 are stranger than fiction. Let’s take a ride through some unbelievable poker lore. TEXAS DOLLY This is one of the most famous poker hands and its history trails down to Doyle Brunson’s tryst with poker. 10-2 is considered to be a completely junk hand in poker with negligible potential value; however this same trash hand helped Doyle Brunson create marvels on the poker table in WSOP 1976 and 1977 main events. The World Series of Poker was only in its seventh year in 1976, yet it featured one of the most memorable hands of all time. While heads-up in the Main Event against Jesse Alto, Doyle “Texas Dolly”.

Speaking of celebrities, watch Kevin Hart, Brad Garrett, Jennifer Tilly, and Gabe Kaplan play on poker on PokerGO right here.

Daniel Negreanu – Kid Poker is a legend in the game and recently signed to GG Poker as their new ambassador after leaving PokerStars following several years of representing them. The most successful Canadian in poker history has six WSOP bracelets and over $40 million in live tournament earnings to his name.

Phil Ivey – Legendary players don’t come much bigger than the 10-time bracelet winner who is respected by all of his peers and widely regarded as one of if not the most gifted player ever to toss in a three-bet. Still a major force to be reckoned with, whether in high stakes cash games or the biggest tournaments around.

Phil Hellmuth – The Poker Brat is a titan amongst men, the record 15-time WSOP bracelet winner and a man who has his own legend which follows him around. Highly decorated, Hellmuth has the happy knack of creating headlines whether he wins or not… but he usually wins.

Patrik Antonius – The Finnish sensation is still a major force at both the online and live tables, and always playing at the highest stakes. Listen to a podcast featuring Patrik Antonius right here.

Justin Bonomo – Second on the all-time money list, Bonomo has been so successful in recent times that he even had a year named after him. Still one of the most dangerous players ever to sit down at the table, and certainly the most dangerous with pink hair.

Erik Seidel – The man for all seasons, Seidel has won major money in four decades, and is still running deep in major tournaments virtually every month. Maybe he’ll go on forever, and he’s certainly outlasted dozens of other greats.

Fedor Holz – the German super high roller who redefined winning at high stakes, Holz has since retired from professional poker, but still dabbles in the game and has since invested in two new business endeavors – the Primed Mind app and Pokercode, where he and Matthias Eibinger blow open the GTO plays that turn great players into elite players.

Shaun Deeb – The most consistent WSOP player in recent history, Shaun Deeb has been the player to beat in the race for the Player of the Year title the past two years, but whenever Deeb takes the felt, he is a player to beat. Mixed games are no problem for the man many poker players and fans love to hate.

Most Famous Poker Hands Wins

Bryn Kenney – The most successful tournament poker player ever according to the all-time money list, Bryn Kenney is a poker inspiration to many – including his peers. Keeney has a stranglehold over the current elite and is the man at the top of the tree. Anyone hunting him down had better have an amazing dedication to the game, phenomenal discipline and the ability to mix it like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Listen to Bryn Kenney on the Heads Up with Remko Podcast right here.

Sam Soverel – The British Poker Open and Poker Master 2019 champion, Sam Soverel has dominated the elite scene in 2019 and is only likely to get better. Blessed with a phenomenal temperament and all the skills to put anyone to the test, Soverel is a huge fish in the biggest pond.

Want to watch the best in action? You can catch up on the recent Poker Masters action or watch the latest live streaming action from the Caribbean over on PokerGO. Subscribe today for 24/7 access to the world’s best poker content. This was the first article is a series on the most famous poker professionals.

This post works with 5-card Poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards. The discussion is mostly mathematical, using the Poker hands to illustrate counting techniques and calculation of probabilities

Working with poker hands is an excellent way to illustrate the counting techniques covered previously in this blog – multiplication principle, permutation and combination (also covered here). There are 2,598,960 many possible 5-card Poker hands. Thus the probability of obtaining any one specific hand is 1 in 2,598,960 (roughly 1 in 2.6 million). The probability of obtaining a given type of hands (e.g. three of a kind) is the number of possible hands for that type over 2,598,960. Thus this is primarily a counting exercise.

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Preliminary Calculation

Usually the order in which the cards are dealt is not important (except in the case of stud poker). Thus the following three examples point to the same poker hand. The only difference is the order in which the cards are dealt.

These are the same hand. Order is not important.

The number of possible 5-card poker hands would then be the same as the number of 5-element subsets of 52 objects. The following is the total number of 5-card poker hands drawn from a standard deck of 52 cards.

The notation is called the binomial coefficient and is pronounced “n choose r”, which is identical to the number of -element subsets of a set with objects. Other notations for are , and . Many calculators have a function for . Of course the calculation can also be done by definition by first calculating factorials.

Thus the probability of obtaining a specific hand (say, 2, 6, 10, K, A, all diamond) would be 1 in 2,598,960. If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond cards? It is

This is definitely a very rare event (less than 0.05% chance of happening). The numerator 1,287 is the number of hands consisting of all diamond cards, which is obtained by the following calculation.

The reasoning for the above calculation is that to draw a 5-card hand consisting of all diamond, we are drawing 5 cards from the 13 diamond cards and drawing zero cards from the other 39 cards. Since (there is only one way to draw nothing), is the number of hands with all diamonds.

If 5 cards are randomly drawn, what is the probability of getting a 5-card hand consisting of cards in one suit? The probability of getting all 5 cards in another suit (say heart) would also be 1287/2598960. So we have the following derivation.

Thus getting a hand with all cards in one suit is 4 times more likely than getting one with all diamond, but is still a rare event (with about a 0.2% chance of happening). Some of the higher ranked poker hands are in one suit but with additional strict requirements. They will be further discussed below.

Another example. What is the probability of obtaining a hand that has 3 diamonds and 2 hearts? The answer is 22308/2598960 = 0.008583433. The number of “3 diamond, 2 heart” hands is calculated as follows:

One theme that emerges is that the multiplication principle is behind the numerator of a poker hand probability. For example, we can think of the process to get a 5-card hand with 3 diamonds and 2 hearts in three steps. The first is to draw 3 cards from the 13 diamond cards, the second is to draw 2 cards from the 13 heart cards, and the third is to draw zero from the remaining 26 cards. The third step can be omitted since the number of ways of choosing zero is 1. In any case, the number of possible ways to carry out that 2-step (or 3-step) process is to multiply all the possibilities together.

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The Poker Hands

Here’s a ranking chart of the Poker hands.

The chart lists the rankings with an example for each ranking. The examples are a good reminder of the definitions. The highest ranking of them all is the royal flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit with the highest card being Ace. There is only one such hand in each suit. Thus the chance for getting a royal flush is 4 in 2,598,960.

Royal flush is a specific example of a straight flush, which consists of 5 consecutive cards in one suit. There are 10 such hands in one suit. So there are 40 hands for straight flush in total. A flush is a hand with 5 cards in the same suit but not in consecutive order (or not in sequence). Thus the requirement for flush is considerably more relaxed than a straight flush. A straight is like a straight flush in that the 5 cards are in sequence but the 5 cards in a straight are not of the same suit. For a more in depth discussion on Poker hands, see the Wikipedia entry on Poker hands.

The counting for some of these hands is done in the next section. The definition of the hands can be inferred from the above chart. For the sake of completeness, the following table lists out the definition.

Definitions of Poker Hands

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Counting Poker Hands

Straight Flush
Counting from A-K-Q-J-10, K-Q-J-10-9, Q-J-10-9-8, …, 6-5-4-3-2 to 5-4-3-2-A, there are 10 hands that are in sequence in a given suit. So there are 40 straight flush hands all together.

Four of a Kind
There is only one way to have a four of a kind for a given rank. The fifth card can be any one of the remaining 48 cards. Thus there are 48 possibilities of a four of a kind in one rank. Thus there are 13 x 48 = 624 many four of a kind in total.

Most Famous Poker Hands Clip Art

Full House
Let’s fix two ranks, say 2 and 8. How many ways can we have three of 2 and two of 8? We are choosing 3 cards out of the four 2’s and choosing 2 cards out of the four 8’s. That would be = 4 x 6 = 24. But the two ranks can be other ranks too. How many ways can we pick two ranks out of 13? That would be 13 x 12 = 156. So the total number of possibilities for Full House is

Note that the multiplication principle is at work here. When we pick two ranks, the number of ways is 13 x 12 = 156. Why did we not use = 78?

Flush
There are = 1,287 possible hands with all cards in the same suit. Recall that there are only 10 straight flush on a given suit. Thus of all the 5-card hands with all cards in a given suit, there are 1,287-10 = 1,277 hands that are not straight flush. Thus the total number of flush hands is 4 x 1277 = 5,108.

Most Famous Poker Hands Held

Straight
There are 10 five-consecutive sequences in 13 cards (as shown in the explanation for straight flush in this section). In each such sequence, there are 4 choices for each card (one for each suit). Thus the number of 5-card hands with 5 cards in sequence is . Then we need to subtract the number of straight flushes (40) from this number. Thus the number of straight is 10240 – 10 = 10,200.

Three of a Kind
There are 13 ranks (from A, K, …, to 2). We choose one of them to have 3 cards in that rank and two other ranks to have one card in each of those ranks. The following derivation reflects all the choosing in this process.

Two Pair and One Pair
These two are left as exercises.

High Card
The count is the complement that makes up 2,598,960.

Most Famous Poker Hands Game

The following table gives the counts of all the poker hands. The probability is the fraction of the 2,598,960 hands that meet the requirement of the type of hands in question. Note that royal flush is not listed. This is because it is included in the count for straight flush. Royal flush is omitted so that he counts add up to 2,598,960.

Probabilities of Poker Hands

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2017 – Dan Ma