How to Play Five Card Draw: Rules & Strategy
Learn how Five Card Draw works, the hand rankings, what to hold and what to discard, and the odds behind each draw. A beginner's guide.
Five Card Draw is the classic home-game poker variant, and the easiest poker game to learn. You get five cards, you swap some of them once, and the best hand wins. There are no community cards and only one real decision, which cards to keep. This guide covers the rules, the hand rankings and the odds that tell you what to hold.
Table Edge is a free practice site: everything here uses practice chips with no cash value, and nothing in this guide guarantees a win.
Who you are playing against
Unlike blackjack, craps or roulette, draw poker is not played against the house. You play against the other people at the table, and the only edge that matters is making better decisions than they do. A casino or card room that hosts the game usually takes a small cut of each pot, called a rake, but there is no fixed house edge on your bets in the way there is on the other casino games. That means your results depend on how well you play compared with the other players, which is why poker rewards study and experience more than games of pure chance.
How a hand works
- Ante. Everyone puts a small forced bet, the ante, into the pot before the cards are dealt, so there is always something to win.
- Deal. Each player gets five cards face down.
- The draw. After looking at your cards, you choose which ones to hold and which to discard. The dealer replaces each discarded card with a new one from the deck. You can discard anywhere from none to all five (although drawing five new cards is rare).
- Showdown. The remaining players reveal their hands, and the best five-card poker hand wins the pot. If two hands are equal, the pot is split. An unpaired card used to break a tie between two hands of the same rank is called a kicker.
Full games with real money usually add rounds of betting before and after the draw (check, bet, raise, call, fold), and the choices you make there are about reading your opponents. The practice table on this site skips the betting rounds, so you can focus on the draw, which is the part of the game that is pure math.
Hand rankings, best to worst
| Rank | Hand | Odds in a five-card deal |
|---|
| 1 | Royal flush | 1 in 649,740 |
| 2 | Straight flush | 1 in 72,193 |
| 3 | Four of a kind | 1 in 4,165 |
| 4 | Full house | 1 in 694 |
| 5 | Flush | 1 in 509 |
| 6 | Straight | 1 in 255 |
| 7 | Three of a kind | 1 in 47 |
| 8 | Two pair | 1 in 21 |
| 9 | One pair | About 42% of hands |
| 10 | High card | About 50% of hands |
The rarer a hand is, the higher it ranks. About half of all five-card hands have no pair at all, so even a single pair beats half of what other players are holding, and two pair or better beats most of it. The ranking is exactly the same in every poker game, including video poker. The poker hand probabilities chart shows the exact count for each hand.
The draw: what to hold
You aren't paid by the type of hand. You win by finishing with the best hand at the showdown, so the goal of the draw is to give yourself the best chance of finishing in a stronger category. This is a pure math problem, and it is the same skill as in video poker: which cards give you the best odds of ending up with a strong hand?
A few guidelines:
- Keep made hands. With a straight, flush, full house or better, don't draw at all. Every card you hold is a card you can't lose by drawing, and breaking up a made hand rarely makes sense.
- Hold a pair. A pair is the most useful thing to hold, because half of all hands have no pair at all. Keep the pair and draw three cards.
- Hold two pair. Draw one card. You have a chance to turn it into a full house.
- Draw to a flush or a straight when you are one card away. A four-card flush is a 19% shot (9 of the 47 unseen cards), and an open-ended four-card straight is 17% (8 cards). An inside straight draw is only about 8.5% (4 cards), so it usually isn't worth chasing unless there's nothing better.
- With nothing, keep your high cards. If you have no pair and no good draw, hold your highest cards and replace the rest. Drawing five new cards gives you a pair or better only about 50% of the time, the same as the odds of any fresh hand.
What the draw is worth
Holding one pair (say, two aces) and drawing three cards, your final hand will be:
| Final hand | Chance |
|---|
| Still one pair | 71.8% |
| Two pair | 16.2% |
| Three of a kind | 10.8% |
| Full house | 1.0% |
| Four of a kind | 0.2% |
So you improve your hand about 28% of the time, and the other 72% of the time you keep the pair you started with, which is still a competitive hand. The hold trainer shows you the exact chance of each final hand for any cards you are dealt, and compares your choice with the recommended one.
Betting and reading opponents
When the game includes betting, the math tells you what to hold and the people tell you whether to keep betting. A few ideas that apply to every poker game:
- Your hand's strength is relative. A pair can be a great hand against three opponents who all drew to straights, and a weak hand against a player who stood pat.
- The number of cards a player draws tells you something. A player who draws one card probably has two pair or a four-card draw. A player who draws three probably holds a pair. A player who draws none has a made hand, or is bluffing.
- Bluffing is part of the game, but it works only when the story your bets tell makes sense. Texas Hold'em is the better place to learn about pot odds, which apply here too.
Money and mindset
Decide how much you are willing to lose before you sit down. Poker results swing widely over short stretches, even when you play well, and a beginner playing against experienced players will usually lose. Practice for free first. The bankroll simulator shows how wide the swings can be.
If gambling is affecting your life, you can reach the National Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-800-522-4700.
Quick recap
- It's a game against the other players, not the house.
- Ante, five cards, one draw, showdown.
- Keep made hands, hold pairs, draw to four-card flushes and open-ended straights, and replace everything else.
- A pair improves about 28% of the time when you draw three cards.
- The best hand at the showdown wins, and the ranking is the same as in every other poker game.
Ready to practise? Try the hold trainer, then play at the free Five Card Draw table. To compare poker with other games, see the best odds in the casino.
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