Poker Rules & Hand Rankings

A quick reference for Texas Hold'em, and the terms LineSharp uses everywhere else on the site. For how to actually use the product, see the Guide.

Hand Rankings

Best to worst. Any five-card hand falls into exactly one of these.

  1. 1
    Straight Flush
    Five consecutive cards, same suit. The best possible one — A-K-Q-J-T suited — is sometimes called a Royal Flush, but it's not a separate category; it's just the highest straight flush.
  2. 2
    Four of a Kind
    Four cards of the same rank ("quads"), plus any kicker.
  3. 3
    Full House
    Three of a kind plus a pair. Ties are broken by the three-of-a-kind rank first, then the pair rank.
  4. 4
    Flush
    Five cards of the same suit, not in sequence.
  5. 5
    Straight
    Five consecutive cards, mixed suits. Ace can play high (...Q-K-A) or low (A-2-3-4-5), but not both in the same straight.
  6. 6
    Three of a Kind
    Three cards of the same rank ("trips" or "a set"), plus two unrelated kickers.
  7. 7
    Two Pair
    Two separate pairs, plus one kicker.
  8. 8
    Pair
    Two cards of the same rank, plus three kickers.
  9. 9
    High Card
    No pair or better — ranked by the highest card, then the next, and so on.

How a Hand Plays Out

Each player gets two private hole cards. Betting happens in rounds (“streets”) as shared community cards are revealed:

Preflop
0 board cards — just your hole cards
Flop
3 community cards revealed
Turn
4th community card
River
5th and final community card

On each street you act with one of five choices: fold (give up the hand), check (pass, only if nobody has bet), call (match the current bet), bet (open the betting), or raise (increase an existing bet). Whoever has the best five-card hand at showdown — using any combination of their two hole cards and the five community cards — wins the pot.

Terms Used in LineSharp

Equity

Your probability of winning (or tying, weighted proportionally) the hand if it were played out from this point, averaged over all remaining ways the cards could fall. LineSharp computes this with a real Monte Carlo simulation, not a lookup table or estimate — see /guide.

Pot odds / required equity

The minimum equity you need to profitably call a bet, given the size of the call relative to the resulting pot: toCall / (potSize + toCall). If your actual equity clears this bar, calling is profitable in the long run even if you lose this particular hand.

Risk profile

LineSharp's three built-in playing styles, applied on top of the equity/pot-odds math: Conservative demands more equity than pot odds strictly require before continuing, and only bets/raises with strong hands (70%+ equity). Optimal follows pot odds exactly, with a 60% bar to bet/raise. Risky continues with less equity than pot odds require and bets/raises more often (50%+ equity), sizing bets closer to a full pot.

Street

A betting round tied to how much of the board is revealed: preflop (no board), flop (3 cards), turn (4 cards), river (5 cards), then showdown.

Blinds & position

The small blind (SB) and big blind (BB) are forced bets posted before cards are dealt, rotating each hand. The button (dealer position) acts last on every street after preflop, which is a real positional advantage — acting last means seeing everyone else's decision first.

Leak

A LineSharp-specific term: a recurring gap between what you actually did and what the equity engine says was optimal, surfaced on /app/analysis after you've played enough hands against the bots for a pattern to show up (e.g. folding too often when calling was correct).

Try these concepts in a free practice hand →← Back to Home