Here's How Likely Each Poker Hand Is

Poker is a fantastic game, particularly alluring to competitive, creative types who love numbers. Business Insider's Eugene Kim has profiled some of Silicon Valley's biggest poker fans, and the game is also huge draw with the Wall Street crowd.

While I'm far from a serious, professional poker player, I do occasionally get a chance to enjoy a game with friends. And I also love math and statistics.

So I decided to look at some of the basic mathematics of the game. Here, I go through the probabilities of drawing each five-card poker hand from a deck of cards. These probabilities are handy to have in the back of your head in a poker game, and they are the reason why hands are ranked the way they are: a straight flush is way less likely than a pair, so this is why the straight flush wins.