Can someone explain this to me. I end a showdown and both myself and another have a Flush with Ace high, yet he gets all of the chips! I can’t make sense of it! Here’s the link:
What do I not understand about this?
Thanks for the feedback,
Kevin
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Hi Kevin,
Although you both had flushes, he had J9 and you only had 64 spades. Therefore he had the better flush hand and won the pot.
Hope this clarifies things.
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Hold’em is always the best 5 card combination. The dealer always tries to find the best hand combination. The best combination could be 1, 2 or 0 of your hole cards. If the showdown is equal then the pot will be split with a tie between players.
Split pots are common with A high straight on some boards and many other straights. A flush is impossible to split unless the best flush is the community cards shown.
Example: flop is AhAdAc and the turn is As quads. Any player in the pot has quads, the best hand possible, but the kicker also counts.
If the river is a K everyone has a split/tie pot & the best hand called the nuts. No player can beat quads with a K kicker. If the river is a 2 then the best kicker would win. Hence a K kick is best then Q J T etc. Every card out of 5 best counts.
The flush is A high but the next best card is a J which beats your best card a 6. A flush is a flush & a great hand but a better flush beats a weaker flush.
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Jack is high.
The problem with flushes is that, pretty much by definition, other players are going to have flushes. This is because, to get a flush, there must be at least 3 cards of the same suit in the community cards.
You might get lucky - in this case, you might be the only player with spades - but because there are three spades in the community cards and you’ve got two spades (4 and 6), that means there are 8 other spades that are either in the deck of cards or with other players (including the king and queen). Every other player might well have a spade and therefore a flush. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. Your cards are 4 and 6 of spades, so a weak flush (on the other hand, you were only one card away from a straight flush (either 2 or 7 of spades)).
So you made a pretty high-risk bet and paid the price. Your opponent (the winner) took a risk as well, because he only had a jack of spades and pinned his hopes on you not having a king or a queen of spades. But his bet paid off. Note that his 9 of spades would’ve beaten you as well.