the ten hands from best to worst — and how often each one is dealt in five cards
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
Frequencies are for five cards from a single 52-card deck without jokers. The ace plays both high (10-J-Q-K-A) and low (A-2-3-4-5); suits are all equal.
The order of the hands matches the order of their rarity: each one down the ladder comes up more often than the one above. A flush beats a straight — and it is indeed rarer: 5,108 hands versus 10,200.
And the most common hand is an empty one: of the 2,598,960 ways to deal five cards, 1,302,540 make nothing at all — no pair, no straight, no flush: 50.1 %. Everything that beats a pair adds up to only 7.6 %.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 6 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
the IWF colour code and the plate count: from target weight to each side of the bar, no calculator
why a “yes” from a test that is right 99 times in 100 is wrong more than nine times in ten when one in a thousand has the thing
the first digit of a number: why a one turns up more than six times as often as a nine, and in which sets that is true
how many people it takes for two of them to share a birthday — and the same count for codes and fingerprints