Does a Flush Beat a Straight?

A flush beats a straight. Every time, in every standard poker game — no exceptions, no house-rule variations that flip it.

A flush is any five cards of one suit (K♦ 9♦ 7♦ 4♦ 2♦). A straight is five cards in sequence with mixed suits (9♦ 8♣ 7♠ 6♥ 5♦). The flush ranks higher for one reason: it is harder to make. In a 52-card deck there are 10,200 ways to draw a straight but only 5,108 ways to draw a flush — almost twice as many straights. Poker always ranks the rarer hand above the more common one, so the flush wins.

That rarity is the whole story. It doesn’t matter how high your straight runs; even an ace-high straight loses to the smallest flush, because the comparison happens between categories, not between individual cards.

The mistake that actually loses pots

Players rarely get the rule itself wrong. What trips them up is failing to spot that a flush is possible.

Picture holding 7♠ 6♠ on a runout of 8♣ 5♦ 2♦ K♦ 9♦. You’ve made a 9-8-7-6-5 straight and it feels great — until you count the diamonds. Four of them are on the board, so anyone with a single diamond has a flush that beats you. This is how good straights quietly turn into losing hands: the player locks onto the sequence and stops reading the suits.

Before you commit chips with a straight, glance at the board for three or four cards of one suit. If they’re there, a flush is live and your straight is in trouble.

One more distinction worth keeping straight: a straight flush is not the same as a straight. Five suited cards in a row (9♥ 8♥ 7♥ 6♥ 5♥) is a straight flush — the second-best hand in poker — and it beats an ordinary flush because it is a flush, just a perfectly ordered one. When someone claims “my straight beat your flush,” they almost always mean a straight flush, or they misread their hand.

For where these sit among everything else, see the full poker hand rankings or the quick what-beats-what chart. And if you want the other tricky mid-ladder matchup, read what beats a full house.