How often are you dealt a pocket pair?
Any pocket pair arrives 5.88% of the time — about 1 in 17 hands, or 16 to 1 against.
Each of the 13 ranks has 6 pair combinations, so 78 of the 1,326 starting hands are pairs. Another way to see it: whatever your first card is, 3 of the remaining 51 cards match its rank — 3 ÷ 51 = 5.88%.
A pair you are dealt is as likely to be deuces as aces. What differs is what happens next: how often the pair flops a set is the same for every rank, but how often an unimproved pair is still the best hand is not.
- Pair combinations per rank6C(4, 2)
- Ranks13
- Pocket pair combinations7813 × 6
- All two-card combinations1,326C(52, 2)
- Probability5.88%78 / 1326
Try it
Change any card; the numbers recompute from the same engine that produced the answer above.
Click any hand. Suited above the diagonal, offsuit below, pairs on it.
Shading: brighter green is higher equity. Monte Carlo simulation, seeded xoshiro128**, 500,000 trials per hand, seed 20260901.
Pocket pair
Pocket Sevens
Equity against random hands
Multi-way, a hand’s share of the pot falls even when it is the favourite: a fair share against 8 opponents is 11.1%.
Head-to-head, exact
Every one of the 1,712,304 possible boards, enumerated for each matchup.
- vs Pocket aces…
- vs Pocket queens…
- vs Ace-king offsuit…
- vs Pocket sevens…