Flush

A flush is made from 5 cards of the same suit (spades, hearts, diamonds or clubs). The suit itself does not matter — a spade flush equals a heart flush if the high card is the same. The best possible flush is the "Nut Flush", a flush containing the Ace of that suit.

A flush shows up in about one of every 32 seven-card hands, so at a full table one appears every few orbits and someone almost certainly has it whenever three of a suit hit the board. That commonness is the whole story of the hand: it wins a lot of medium pots and loses a specific set of very large ones, because a second flush in the same suit is always higher or lower by exactly one card.

Beware "flush over flush" — if 3–4 cards of the same suit are on the board and you hold a low flush, an opponent holding the Ace of that suit beats you. Play the nut flush aggressively; play a small flush cautiously.

Kicker strength decides how you play it. With the ace of the suit you can bet three streets and call a raise, because no other flush beats you. With a middling flush — nine or ten high — you are value-betting twice and folding to a river raise, since the only hands that raise you there are the flushes above yours. On a paired board, treat every flush cautiously: full houses beat all of them, and a player who calls two streets and then raises the river on a paired board is rarely bluffing.

The classic loss is holding a small flush and refusing to believe a bigger one exists, then paying a full-pot river bet with the eight of the suit. The second is checking the nut flush on a dry runout for fear of "scaring" the table, when the ace-high flush is exactly the hand that should be building the pot from the flop.

Hands that beat Flush:

• Royal Flush
• Straight Flush
• Four of a Kind
• Full House

Hands beaten by Flush:

• Straight
• Three of a Kind
• Two Pair
• Pair
• High Card