A Full House is three cards of one rank plus two cards of another. It sits fourth in the hand rankings: only a Four of a Kind, a Straight Flush and a Royal Flush beat it. Players call it a “Full Boat”, or simply a “Boat”.
How it works
All five cards are accounted for: three make the trips, two make the pair. A Full House has no kicker, so a contested pot comes down to the trips and the pair alone.
In Texas Hold’em the shape comes out of seven cards. Hold K♠K♥ on a Q♠Q♦K♦ board and you play Kings full of Queens: the third King came from the board, and so did the Queens.
What beats a full house
Three hands beat a Full House, and nothing else does:
- Four of a Kind - four cards of one rank, 624 combinations.
- Straight Flush - five consecutive cards of one suit, 36 combinations.
- Royal Flush - the top straight flush 10♠J♠Q♠K♠A♠, 4 combinations.
That order isn’t arbitrary: the rarer the hand, the higher it ranks. A Four of a Kind comes up 624 ways against 3,744, so it sits above.
Everything else loses to it: a Flush, a Straight, Three of a Kind, Two Pair, One Pair and High Card.
Does a full house beat a flush
Yes, even though the eye says otherwise. Five cards of one suit feels like the harder job than trips plus a pair.
Rarity decides it, not intuition. A five-card deal holds 5,108 Flushes against 3,744 Full Houses. The Full House is rarer, so it ranks higher. The gap is narrow: a Flush lands only 1.36 times as often.
Comparing two full houses
Rank the trips first, then the pair. The rule is short, and it’s the one players get wrong most often.
Kings full of Threes (K-K-K-3-3) beats Queens full of Aces (Q-Q-Q-A-A). A bigger pair cannot rescue a smaller three of a kind. When both players hold the same trips, the pair decides the pot.
There are exactly 156 distinguishable Full Houses: thirteen ranks for the trips times the twelve ranks left for the pair. The strongest is Aces full of Kings, the weakest Twos full of Threes. Each of those 156 comes in 24 suit arrangements, which is where 3,744 comes from.
Probability
There are two ways to count it, and the numbers are far apart.
- In a five-card deal: 3,744 hands out of 2,598,960 - that is 0.1441%, or about 1 in 694.
- In seven-card Hold’em: 3,473,184 out of 133,784,560 - about 2.6%, or roughly 1 in 39 hands to the river.
The five-card number falls straight out of the counting, no table needed:
- 13 ranks for the trips x 4 ways to pick three suits from four;
- 12 remaining ranks for the pair x 6 ways to pick two suits;
- 13 x 4 x 12 x 6 = 3,744.
That number says how rare the shape is on its own, and it sets its place in the rankings. The Hold’em number answers something else: how often a Full House reaches showdown. The best five cards come out of seven, so it lands more often there.
All told, a Full House comes up exactly six times as often as Four of a Kind, and 1.36 times less often than a Flush.