High Card is the lowest category in poker. Nobody has paired or made anything else, so the hand is worth exactly what its highest card is worth. In the poker hand rankings it sits below One Pair and therefore below every other combination.
How it works
There is nothing to compare but the cards themselves. A hand with an Ace and no pair is Ace-high, and it beats every other unpaired hand.
In Texas Hold’em this is the hand you hold when the board misses you completely. It is why a hand like A-K can win a small pot unimproved, but almost never a big one.
What beats high card
Everything beats it: One Pair, Two Pair, Three of a Kind, a Straight and a Flush. Above those sit a Full House, Four of a Kind, a Straight Flush and a Royal Flush.
Two players who both hold High Card compare cards, and that is the only situation in which this hand wins.
Is an Ace high or low?
By default the Ace is high, which is what makes Ace-high the best High Card hand there is. It plays low in exactly one combination: the wheel, A-2-3-4-5, the lowest Straight. It can never sit in the middle of a sequence, so Q-K-A-2-3 is not a Straight.
Comparing two high card hands
Compare the highest card, then the next, and so on through all five. Ace-high beats King-high; A-K-J-9-5 beats A-K-J-8-5 on the fourth card.
There are 1,277 distinguishable hands here: every set of five ranks except the ten sequences that would make a Straight. A Flush has exactly the same number of distinguishable hands, because the ranks are the same and only the suits differ. If the board is high enough, both players can end up playing five board cards and the pot is split.
Probability
There are two ways to count it, and here they do not just diverge, they reverse.
- In a five-card deal: 1,302,540 combinations out of 2,598,960 - that is 50.1177%, slightly more than every other category combined.
- In seven-card Hold’em: 23,294,460 out of 133,784,560 - that is 17.4%, or about 1 hand in 6 played to the river.
The five-card number comes out by subtracting twice: 1,277 rank sets that are not straights x 1,020 suit arrangements that are not flushes = 1,302,540.
High Card is the only category that gets rarer when you go from five cards to seven. For every other hand the two extra cards add chances to make something; here they take those chances away. The most common hand of a five-card deal loses first place in Hold’em to One Pair.
The lowest High Card hand possible is 7-5-4-3-2, since 2-3-4-5-6 would be a Straight.