Two things aren't settled in Short Deck: whether a straight beats three of a kind, and whether the pot is seeded by antes or blinds. Here's the data, current industry practice, and where we stand — the two tend to travel together, so our standard adopts them as one set.
One game, two ranking systems
"Flush beats full house" is essentially uncontested; everyone agrees. But the relative order of a straight and three of a kind still has two schools of thought:
| Approach | Order | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| A. Traditional | Straight > trips | Triton Poker Series (since 2018), PokerStars, GGPoker |
| B. Frequency-based | Trips > straight | Some online 6+ variants, some teaching material |
The same holding can produce different results on different platforms — one of the most common traps for newcomers.
Best five-card hand at showdown from a random starting hand — Short Deck vs standard Hold'em
| Hand | Short Deck (36) | Hold'em (52) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Straight flush | 0.11% | 0.031% | ≈3.5× |
| Four of a kind | 0.57% | 0.168% | ≈3.4× |
| Flush | 2.12% | 3.03% | gets harder — the only one |
| Full house | 7.59% | 2.60% | ≈2.9× |
| Straight | 14.14% | 4.62% | ≈3.1× |
| Three of a kind | 7.25% | 4.83% | ≈1.5× |
| Two pair | 38.30% | 23.50% | ≈1.6× |
| One pair | 27.74% | 43.82% | falls |
| No pair | 2.81% | 17.41% | falls sharply |
Short Deck figures: CardQuant. Hold'em figures: Wikipedia, "Poker probability" (seven-card distribution). Both describe the best five-card hand at showdown from a random starting hand, board-inclusive, rounded.
We recommend standardising on straight > trips — approach A
When the Triton Poker Series first televised Short Deck in 2018, it used straight over trips; PokerStars' 6+ Hold'em and GGPoker followed. Wikipedia's entry on Six-plus hold 'em notes the same: "In theory, three-of-a-kind ranks higher than a straight as the probability of achieving three-of-a-kind is lower than a straight in short-deck, however recent games have been ranking straight higher than three-of-a-kind which has become standard."
Asking a Hold'em player to remember one thing — "flush beats full house" — is already a big enough ask. Adding "trips beat a straight" means overwriting two intuitions instead of one, doubling the learning curve in an already niche format.
Short Deck sells itself on high-frequency action and big swings. Demote the straight below trips and it becomes a comparatively weak hand; drawing to it loses value and players chase less. (This is inference, not an empirical finding.) Keeping the straight on top preserves that aggression.
Note that a strict frequency-based reordering runs into trouble elsewhere: two pair (38.3%) is more common than one pair (27.74%) in Short Deck, yet nobody seriously proposes ranking one pair above two pair. In other words, the industry never applied pure probability ordering in the first place — consistency and playability already outweigh mathematical neatness.
Everyone antes, the button antes one extra, no small or big blind
The second structural difference is how the pot is seeded. Most Short Deck games don't use blinds at all — every player posts an ante before the cards come out. And here is the detail people most often get wrong: the button posts one extra. The antes are not equal.
| Game | Actual structure | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Triton Poker Series | One ante each, two on the button | Double ante |
| PokerStars 6+ Hold'em | One ante each, button also posts the only blind | Button blind |
| GGPoker | One ante each, one extra on the button | Triton structure |
Different names, same mechanism: the button's extra bet is the replacement for the big blind. It does the same job, but it travels with the button — so nobody is forced to put money in while also being out of position.
Straight-versus-trips still has two competing answers. The ante structure has essentially one: Triton, PokerStars and GGPoker all use it. The disagreement here is far smaller.
Short Deck came out of high-stakes cash games in Asia, developed by Paul Phua and Richard Yong, partly to fix a specific problem: amateurs want to play more hands, but in standard Hold'em tightening up punishes them. Antes put money in the pot before the first card, so folding costs something concrete and action follows.
In a six-handed game with a 1,000 ante, there are already 7,000 chips in the middle pre-flop. The first player to limp is getting roughly 7:1. In a game where equities run close anyway, that makes multi-way pots the norm — which is the whole point of Short Deck. Switch to blinds and the game tightens up noticeably.
In practice, ante-only tends to come bundled with straight > trips, while rooms that keep blinds more often pair them with trips > straight. Both packages are internally consistent; the real problem is mixing them — a game with blinds and straight > trips asks players to hold two conflicting sets of expectations at once.
But "internally consistent" isn't the same as "should both exist". The value of a standard is that there is only one. So the Short Deck Home Standard picks a side rather than leaving the market to choose between two:
effBB = 2 × ante is the nominal scale (the button's contribution), used only to size bets — the "x" in "open to 3x" is effBB, so 100 antes = 50 effBB. But each player's forced contribution per hand runs about 1.46× higher than in standard Hold'em, so chips burn faster and the felt depth needs a further discount: 2 × 1.46 ≈ 3. Both numbers are right, for different jobs: divide by 2 to size bets, divide by 3 to judge depth.Check the ranking order and the forced-bet structure whenever you switch sites or tours: most mainstream games use straight > trips plus "ante from everyone, one extra on the button", but exceptions exist.
Publish the full ranking order and the forced-bet structure (ante size, whether the button doubles, action order on each street) — don't just say "flush beats full house".
State the conditions behind any probability figure (how many cards, board-inclusive or not). A single number shouldn't carry a ranking argument on its own.