Teen Patti winning chances: how often each hand wins

Hand rankings tell you that a pair beats a high card. They do not tell you how often your pair will win, and that depends mostly on one thing: how many opponents are still in the hand. We worked out the win chances for 13 common hands against one to five opponents. The table is below, followed by what it means at the table.

Win chances by hand and number of opponents

Each figure is the chance that your hand is the best at a show, if every opponent stays in to the end with whatever they were dealt.

Ties are counted as half a win. The figures use the standard Indian order: trail, pure sequence, sequence, colour, pair, high card, with A-K-Q the top run and A-2-3 the second. See how we worked it out at the end.

What the numbers show

Your hand loses value fast as players are added

A pair of 10s wins 85% of the time against one player and less than half the time against five. Nothing about the cards changed. With five opponents there are five chances for someone to hold a better pair or a colour.

This is the most useful habit in Teen Patti: count the players still in before you decide how good your hand is. The Teen Patti tricks guide builds most of its advice on this.

A small pair is barely better than a top ace high

A pair of 2s and an A-K-J high card win almost exactly as often (74.1% and 74.3% heads-up). Both beat nearly every high-card hand and lose to almost everything else. A-K-J edges ahead because you are holding an ace, a king and a jack, so opponents have fewer of those cards for high pairs and top sequences.

So do not treat every pair as strong. A low pair against four opponents wins less than one show in three.

King high and below are weak at a full table

Against one opponent, K-10-7 is a coin flip. Against three, it wins about one show in eight. Queen high and jack high are close to hopeless once three or more players are in. These are the hands to pack early when the table is full and the stake is rising.

Colours and sequences hold up well

Even the weakest colour in the table, 7-5-2, still wins nearly two shows in three against five opponents. A plain sequence wins more than 86% of the time. If you hold one of these, stay in and look for ways to get more chips into the pot.

Trails and pure sequences almost never lose

The lowest trail, 2-2-2, loses only to a higher trail. The lowest pure sequence, 4-3-2 of one suit, loses only to a trail or a higher pure sequence. Either one wins more than 97% of shows against five players. These hands are also rare: you get a trail about once in 425 deals. The hand rankings guide shows how often each hand is dealt.

How players folding changes things

Real tables are not five players all going to a show. Players with weak hands pack early, and the ones who stay usually have something. That makes the remaining hands stronger than random.

In practice:

• If several players are still betting seen, expect at least one of them to hold a pair or better, and treat your high-card hand as weaker than the table says.
• If everyone else has packed except one blind player, the blind player's hand is still random, so the one-opponent column applies.
• A side show against one player is a straight comparison, so the one-opponent column tells you how likely you are to survive it.

How we worked it out

For one opponent we checked every possible hand they could hold from the 49 cards left after your three: 18,424 hands in all. For two to five opponents we dealt 300,000 random sets of hands for each row from a shuffled deck, so the opponents' cards never overlap with each other or with yours. Figures for two or more opponents can differ from the exact value by about 0.2 percentage points.

Ties, where two hands are exactly equal, are rare in Teen Patti and are counted as half a win.