Everyone loves getting a full house when they play online poker. Perhaps that’s because a full house — three of one card matched with two of another — was the first hand that used all five cards without including ‘kickers’, spare cards that can be utilized along with lower rankings with regard to their rank.
Maybe it’s also down to the fact that a full house used to be nicknamed a ‘boat’ due to the ‘full boat’ reputation the hand had when it was played on the Mississippi riverboats upon which the game of poker was developed in its infancy.
Whatever the reason, everyone loves turning over the cards that contribute to it. So, what are the chances of getting a full house in any given hand?
What is a Full House in Poker?
The definition of a full house in poker —g or a ‘boat’ or ‘full boat’, is three cards of one rank and two cards of another, that is to say, within the same five-card hand. An example of this would be ‘nines over aces’. The over in the description refers to whichever card you have three of, so in this case, your hand would be 9-9-9-A-A. If you had aces over nines, then your hand would be A-A-A-9-9.
The strongest full house in poker is, you’ve guessed it, aces over kings, or as it is often referred to, ‘aces full’. There are of course a number of different ways to obtain a full house. You can be dealt a pair in your hand, picking up another of that card and a different pair on the board. You could have one card of each in your hand and pick up two of one and one of the other across the five community cards. You could, of course, have one card that meets with two of its value on a paired board.
Finally, you could have none of the cards of a full house that is then dealt out as the five community cards. This would mean the dealer finds three of one card and two of another in succession, with that full house being known as ‘playing the board’.
What are the Odds of Getting a Full House?
Put in the simplest percentile terms, the chances of drawing a full house at the start of the hand are 0.1441%. That’s because of the 2,598,960 unique hands that can play out in poker, only 3,744 of them are full houses. Is that the exact probability of getting one?
To answer that, we’ll need to look more deeply that simply imagining a set of hands and what the basic odds are. Poker is played across five streets, not simply before the flop lands, and no full house can ever be made without the help of at least a flop.
A full house will be dealt, on average, around once every 694 deals, but that seems astronomically rare. If it feels even rarer at your local casino, that’s possibly because the average number of hands dealt inside a live casino range from between 30-40 per hour.
At the online poker felt, you’ll likely see something like 120 hands an hour, so if you’re playing four tables at once, then you’re going to see around ten times as many hands per hour. In fact, you’d only have to play for around 90 minutes doing that to expect to have a full house yourself. That is, however, if you play every hand to the river.
How the Odds of a Full House Change
Quite obviously, the odds of making a full house in poker games online on the flop are vastly different when you differentiate between the cards you are dealt and upon which street you’re drawing for a full house to.
Hitting a full house on the flop is extremely rare, in fact it’s a flat 0.14% with a randomly drawn starting hand. With an unpaired hand, those odds drop to 0.09%, but with a pocket pair = 0.98%. The odds change dramatically if you have that pocket pair, hitting a ‘boat’ almost once every 100 hands.
If you have two-pair by the flop, then the chances of you turning the full house are 8.5%. Assuming you then miss, the odds from turn to river improve slightly to 8.7%. The combined odds — i.e. hitting a full house when you have two-pair after the flop are 16.5% from flop to river, which is slightly higher than your chances with three of a kind from the same point (16.5%). If you have three of a kind, then your chances of hitting a full house by the river when you have those three matching cards on the flop are 33.4%, over a one-in-three chance.
Hitting a full house might be difficult, but the feeling when it happens cannot be measured in simple percentile terms… because it feels fantastic!
