Re: Poker Paradoxes ?
We do rank hands like that in the first place, imo.
Sure, an ace-high straight is both the most common straight and the highest straight. Hoever, that's not how I look at it.
I look at it this way:
We have different "classes" of hands, ranked according to rareness:
Straight flushes
quads
.
.
.
pairs
N/A
And within each class, different hands are ranked according to the arbitrary "rank strength" of different cars. Arbitrary because there are four of each rank, but they are all of different worth.
In the above example, we have one of few examples where we cannot rank the classes according to rareness. No matter what we do, we will end up with a discrepancy. This is the only discrepancy I know of at a "class level" (other discrepancies occur on the sublevel, the one guided by the rank of the individual cards) that is unavoidable. There are however such discrepancies that CAN be avoided, but which are still in effect. For instance in soko/Canadian Stud/Scandinavian Stud where the bottom ranking goes pair<fourstraight<fourflush<two pair when it should be pair<two pair<fourflush<fourstraight.
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