hand rankings with a 3 card hand.

[ninja please]

we've recently been playing a game called brag at my weekly poker night, and it has brought up a couple of probability questions that no-one has been able to satisfactorily answer.

in the game, players are dealt 3 cards. there is no draw, nor are there community cards. when i learned the game, it was explained that with only 3 cards, flushes are more common than straights, and thus a straight beats a flush, unlike in traditional poker games. this seems slightly counter-intuitive to me, but i don't really know anything about probability. we haven't played enough to really get a practical sense, so:

question one: can someone here confirm or disconfirm the math behind this idea?

we have also been playing a variation of the game where players are again dealt 3 cards, but this time combine them with 3 community cards to make the best 3 card hand.

question two: if a straight does indeed beat a flush in brag (as explained above) should we use that system of hand rankings in this game, or go back to traditional rankings, as there are 6 cards being used, despite the fact that players are still only making a 3 card hand.

thanks for any help, and apologies if this is uninteresting or rudimentary.

[bigpooch]

There are 4xC(13,3) = 1144 flushes
and only 12x(4^3-1) = 756 straights (even including ABC!)
so flushes do occur more frequently.

Rules: It doesn't matter even if there is a flop and to be
consistent, as long as playability isn't a major issue, it
seems okay.

[ninja please]

ah, thanks for the reply. it makes sense now, i was getting caught up on the idea that the size of the active pool of cards mattered somehow (i.e. if there was no flop or 3 cards or 5 cards or 10 cards) when really all that matters is the number of ways to make either type of 3 card hand from the 52 card deck.

thanks again, it makes sense now.