Short Deck Hold'em in Numbers: Why a Flush Beats a Full House and What Happens to Your Outs

Short Deck Hold'em, also sold as Six Plus Hold'em, deals the familiar game from a deck with every two, three, four and five taken out. Thirty-six cards instead of fifty-two sounds like a small change. It is not: hand frequencies, draw odds and pre-flop equities all move, and one of them moves so far that the hand rankings had to be rewritten. This guide works through the numbers exactly, so you know what has changed before you sit down.

What is removed, and what stays the same

• The deck: nine ranks, six to ace, in four suits: 36 cards.
• The deal: two hole cards each and a five-card board; the best five-card hand wins, exactly as in Hold'em.
• The ace plays at both ends: high in A-K-Q-J-10 and low in A-6-7-8-9, which replaces the A-2-3-4-5 wheel.
• The rankings change: a flush beats a full house. Some rulesets also rank three of a kind above a straight, while others keep the straight higher. Check the hand-ranking table of the room before your first hand.
• The betting structure varies: many games use antes, sometimes with a button blind, instead of the usual small and big blind. The structure changes the arithmetic of stealing and defending, so read it table by table.

Why a flush beats a full house: the exact counts

Hand rankings exist to reward rarity. Count every possible five-card hand in each deck and the reason for the change is immediate. A 52-card deck has 2,598,960 five-card hands; a 36-card deck has 376,992. Full deck first, short deck second:

• Straight flush: 40 against 24.
• Four of a kind: 624 against 288.
• Full house: 3,744 against 1,728.
• Flush: 5,108 against 480.
• Straight: 10,200 against 6,120.
• Three of a kind: 54,912 against 16,128.
• Two pair: 123,552 against 36,288.
• One pair: 1,098,240 against 193,536.
• High card: 1,302,540 against 122,400.

In the full deck there are more flushes than full houses. In the short deck there are 3.6 times as many full houses (1,728) as flushes (480). The reason is simple: each suit now holds only nine cards, so five of one suit is far harder to collect, while pairs and trips become more common because there are fewer ranks to spread across. Ranking the flush above the full house is the old rule, rarer hand wins, applied honestly to a new deck.

Trips against straights: why rooms disagree

The five-card counts say a straight (6,120) is rarer than three of a kind (16,128), so on that measure the straight should stay higher. But nobody plays five-card hands: you make your best five from seven. Enumerating all 8,347,680 seven-card combinations in the short deck gives a different picture of what you will actually hold as your best hand:

• Straight flush: 0.13%
• Four of a kind: 0.53%
• Flush: 2.10%
• Full house: 7.58%
• Straight: 14.02%
• Three of a kind: 7.27%
• Two pair: 37.82%
• One pair: 27.75%
• High card: 2.79%

Over seven cards, a straight is the best hand almost twice as often as three of a kind. With only nine ranks, nearly any connected holding has straight chances on a board, and the A-6-7-8-9 straight adds more. That is the case for ranking trips above the straight, and it is why rulesets split. The figures above use the ordering in which a straight beats trips; with trips ranked higher, trips rise to 7.64% and straights fall to 13.65%, because hands holding both are then counted as trips.

Either way the practical lesson is the same. In more than two-thirds of seven-card holdings, a player's best hand is two pair or better. The bare top pair that wins so many Hold'em pots is a weak hand here.

What happens to your outs

Draws behave very differently because each suit and each rank contributes fewer cards while the pool of unseen cards also shrinks. After the flop you have seen five cards, which leaves 31 unseen in the short deck against 47 in the full deck.

• Flush draw: nine cards per suit, four in view, so 5 outs instead of 9. Probability of completing by the river: 30.1%, against 35.0% in Hold'em. On the turn alone: 16.1%.
• Open-ended straight draw: still 8 outs, but from a smaller pool. By the river: 45.6%, against 31.5% in Hold'em. On the turn alone: 25.8%.
• Gutshot: 4 outs. By the river: 24.5%, against 16.5% in Hold'em.
• Flush draw plus open-ended straight draw: 5 + 8 outs, less the 2 cards that complete both, gives 11 outs. By the river: 59.1%.

The headline reversal: in Hold'em a flush draw is a stronger draw than an open-ended straight draw. In Short Deck the straight draw is much stronger, and it completes to the hand that ranks lower. Flush draws hit less often, but when they hit they beat full houses.

The calculation behind every figure is the one used in full-deck play. The chance of missing twice is (unseen − outs) ÷ unseen × (unseen − 1 − outs) ÷ (unseen − 1). For a 5-out flush draw that is 26/31 × 25/30 = 69.9%, so the draw completes 30.1% of the time. Our article on pot odds shows how to set that probability against the price of a call.

Pairs and sets come more often

With fewer ranks, pocket pairs are dealt more often and flop sets more often. You are dealt a pocket pair 8.6% of the time in Short Deck, once every 11.7 hands, against 5.9% in Hold'em, once every 17. Pocket aces arrive once every 105 hands, against once every 221. A pocket pair flops a set or better 17.1% of the time, against 11.8% in Hold'em, because the two remaining cards of your rank sit among only 34 unseen cards.

Pre-flop equities run much closer

Because draws complete so often, the gaps between starting hands shrink. These all-in equities come from enumerating every possible board, short deck first and full deck second:

• A♥A♠ against K♥K♠: 75.0% against 82.6%.
• A♥K♦ against J♠J♣: 50.7% against 42.8%. The pair is the favourite in Hold'em and the underdog in Short Deck.
• A♥K♥ against J♠J♣: 53.5% in Short Deck.
• J♥10♥ against A♦A♠: 37.5% against 21.7%.

Two consequences follow. First, big pairs are far less dominant, so getting all the money in before the flop with them wins less than Hold'em instinct suggests. Second, connected and suited hands gain a great deal, because straights are frequent and the flush now outranks a full house. Players who carry Hold'em starting-hand charts into Short Deck overvalue pairs and undervalue connectors.

Variance and bankroll

Closer equities mean that more all-in confrontations end near a coin flip, and the antes in many formats build bigger pots relative to the stakes. Both push variance up. Whatever bankroll rule you use for Hold'em, size it more conservatively for Short Deck at the same stakes, and treat a run of losing sessions as the expected product of the format rather than a reason to move up and win it back. If your bankroll sits in a currency other than the room's, the conversion costs set out in our guide to multi-currency bankroll management apply here too.

Where it is dealt

Short Deck is a separate game type, so whether a room spreads it, and when, is a question to answer room by room. Betplay Poker deals Short Deck (6+) alongside Texas Hold'em, Omaha and Sit-and-Go tournaments, and states that not every variant is available at all times. Our guide to where the online poker player pools are covers how traffic is spread by region, and the country hubs, such as Canada, show which operators accept players from each country.

FAQ

Does a flush always beat a full house in Short Deck?

In every common ruleset, yes. The change follows from the deck itself: with nine cards per suit, a flush is much rarer than a full house.

Does three of a kind beat a straight?

It depends on the room. Some rulesets rank trips above a straight because the straight is the more frequent seven-card hand; others keep the Hold'em order. The hand-ranking table in the game rules settles it.

Is A-6-7-8-9 a straight?

Yes. The ace plays low below the six, replacing the A-2-3-4-5 wheel of full-deck Hold'em.

Do Hold'em rules of thumb for outs still work?

Not unchanged. The habit of multiplying outs by four on the flop assumes 47 unseen cards. With 31 unseen, each out is worth more: 8 outs give 45.6% by the river, not the 32% the shortcut suggests. Work from the exact formula, or multiply by about six instead of four.