It is important to understand the winning hand rankings in poker, especially for those who are learning to play the game. Once you know these hands, you would be able to assess the strength of these hands using the winning poker hand ranks. All those players in the highest hand category, often wins the pot. Apart from getting familiar with the winning hand rankings in poker, it is extremely important to understand the basic poker hands.

To begin with, poker hands consist of the best five cards combination. It sounds awfully simple; however a majority of players are not equipped with the correct information when it comes to recognising the winning poker hands. Whenever the best five card combinations are referred, it is important to note that poker is ranked from 2 to A. You need to understand the fact that poker suits such as hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds have no value attached to them and are merely used to determine the flush.

There are 10 different kinds of poker hands and if we follow the poker rules, then each of these hands contains a specific value. Such a value leads them to a particular place in the poker hand hierarchy. These values are also attached to the poker hands based on the difficulty of getting the hand. For an example, some hands such as the High Card are pretty easy to make and a majority of players stand a chance to make this hand since it doesn’t involve any complicated patterns. The other hands such as the Full House are far more difficult to achieve and hence it contains the highest value and is placed above all the hands in the winning poker hands hierarchy.

The bottom of the list comprises of the High Card where any player can win without possessing any higher five card hand. Above this comes the single pair which includes two cards with the same value. In case if two players have the Pair, then the player with the higher value pair wins over the lower value pair.

A step higher than the pair is called the Holding Two Pair and it tends to give a player some more weight in the game. This simply means that the player holds two different pairs in the same five card hand. The next comes the Three of a Kind, which is a hand that comprises of three cards of the same value such as 4-4-4.

The following hands are difficult to achieve in a game of poker and are called the Straight and the Flush. A Straight includes a series of five consecutive cards for any one suit. Flush means five cards of the same suit. It requires a lot of strategy to achieve these winning hands in poker.