Poker Hand Nicknames

• Poker Hand Nicknames American Airlines
• Poker Hand Nicknames Shirt Template
• List Of Poker Hand Nicknames

Tiger: poker lingo for a low hand to include 23456 or 7. Tight Player: poker term for a cautious player who rarely bets on weak hands. Trap: poker lingo for a situation where a player may have to call a big raise to stay in the game. Trey: refers to the 3-card with 3 pips. Two-card Poker: version where the best 2 cards are winners. Poker Hand Nicknames – Made Hands Many made hands have slang terms. While these are not as prevalent as the nicknames given for starting hands, they are still worth knowing. Quads: This slang term is used for a 4 of a kind hand. Poker Corner took a look at the best online poker sites on the internet and we broke them down for you. Take a look through our poker review section and see what poker room is best for you. We've added a list of popular Texas Hold'em hand names to our Advanced Poker section. Learn them, and you can sound cool, like a pro.

While playing a cash game at my local casino in Edinburgh, Scotland last week, the young lady (well, I say young…she turned out to have a few years on me, and I’m not exactly a new-born baby) sat next to me decided to check my knowledge of poker hand nicknames and slang.

She was quite shocked when I didn’t know half of the hand-names she was rattling off, particularly as I write about the game for a living! Embarrassed by this gap in my poker resume, I decided to look into the naming of hands and was completely shocked to find there are literally hundreds and hundreds of nicknames.

Not just ‘Big Slick’, ‘Pocket Rockets’ and ‘The Dead Man’s Hand’ (my knowledge wasn’t quite that limited) but it turns out that some hands have up to a dozen different nicknames and backgrounds.

Let’s look at a few, starting with the one which I was stumped by first.

The Gay Waiter, also known in the US as the San Francisco Busboy.

Not the most politically-correct of names nowadays, but this hand is Q3. Queen with a tray! Amused by me not knowing this, my blonde table companion threw me the next one.

Dolly Parton. Now I knew this one, but flustered I blurted out 88 as an answer. It makes sense given the busty singer’s most obvious attributes, but the answer is obviously 95, from her song and movie title 9 ’til 5.

Even my 88 answer has some novel names I knew nothing of, the most relevant - this year at least - being Back to the Future, given that the speed required to operate the time travel machine was 88mph. Who’d have thunk it? Not this poker journo!

Blondie’s bemusement turned to bewilderment when I was unable to even tell her what the ‘Scottish Card’ was. Apparently the 9 of diamonds is famous in Scottish lore, with the most popular tale being that 9 of the precious gems were stolen from the crown jewels, and every person in the land had to pay a tax until their worth was replaced.

Ok, it wasn’t an actual poker ‘hand’, but still – I’m Scottish and should at least have had some clue about this!

The guy to the left of us was similarly clueless about such slang terms, although he did mention he’d heard a new one –to him – the previous evening at the casino. Now it turns out that in the US it’s known as the Bachelor’s Hand, but in colloquial Scottish at least it’s referred to as the Wanking Hand – yep, you guessed it, Jack-King off!

The poker dictionary seems to revel in some rude, crude and unprintable nicknames, but I’ll try to keep it as clean as possible here – although again a non-PC hand rears its ugly head.

The Transvestite? Nope, I didn’t know it either, but apparently it’s a name for A4.

Why? Well, you peel back one card and see your ace peeking proudly out, and then you get a surge of optimism when the second card seems to be an ace too, but then that sinking feeling that you’ve been cheated appears when you realise it’s just a 4 instead.

Very clever some of these names, and very amusing too. Let’s see if you know this trio…

• The Gilchrist (This is one for the Aussies out there)
• Jack Shit (An English phrase, but easy to work out)
• Joe Louis (A hand for the US boxing fans)

We’ll check how well you did at the end of the article, but first let’s look at a few more.

JQ is known as the Maverick, after the hit TV show theme song which runs, 'Livin' on jacks and queens. Maverick is a legend of the west.'

AK is known widely –and rather cruelly -as Anna Kournikova because it ‘looks good but never wins’. This hand became a running theme in Anthony Holden’s classic poker book ‘A Bigger Deal’, an excellent reprise of his first novel ‘A Big Deal’ set in the casinos and back-rooms which the author spent his days and nights.

A pair of Jacks are commonly called Fishhooks, not only because of their resemblance to them - JJ – but also because ‘fish’ lose with them so often to overpairs.

The Beer Hand – 72offsuit is so-called because you should either fold it and go get a beer, or buy everyone a beer when it somehow wins or, most appropriate, you really have to have your belly –and brain -full of beer already to play poker’s worst starting hand hand!

A couple now for the ‘geeks’ out there.

53? That would be the Juggernaut, an artifact card from Magic: The Gathering which in gaming parlance means it has a power of five and a toughness of three.

42 is known as the Answer – and for all you HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans out there it’s obvious why. For those not conversant with Douglas Adams’ brilliant tale, the computer in the first novel - Deep Thought - works out that 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Speaking of answers, let’s see if you knew the 3 hands from earlier….

The Gilchrist

I didn’t know this one, but apparently it’s used by Australians on account of their cricketer Adam Gilchrist’s excellence at scoring runs in 6’s and 4’s

Jack Shit

This one should be fairly easy – you’ve got half the answer already. It’s a Jack and a deuce –J2 – which is a nothing hand, in line with the JackShit phraseology meaning you have nothing

Joe Louis

Poker Hand Nicknames American Airlines

This is the Ace of clubs and the Ace of spades- A♣ A♠ - and represents the two black eyes you’ll get if you fight the boxing legend!

So, there you have it – just a few of the most unusual and interesting hand-nicknames. There are so many out there that I maybe haven’t done full justice to the history and inventiveness of the naming of hands, but have a search or think yourself and post the best ones you know or find!

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.

Poker Hand Nicknames Shirt Template

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

List Of Poker Hand Nicknames

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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.

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.

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.

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