Players rarely say "three of a kind" at the table. They say trips, announce a boat, and groan about a wheel. These nicknames look like loose slang, but each one points at an exact set of five-card hands, and the number of hands in that set is a short piece of counting. A standard deck deals C(52, 5) = 2,598,960 different five-card hands, all equally likely, so every nickname below has an exact frequency.
Names for a whole rank
Three nicknames simply rename a standard hand rank. The rank positions here count from the top of the usual ten rows, with the royal flush as row one.
- Trips means three of a kind: three cards of one rank and two unrelated cards. It is 7th of ten and there are 54,912 such hands (13 ranks × 4 suit choices × 66 pairs of other ranks × 16 suit patterns).
- Boat (or full boat) means a full house: three of one rank and two of another. It is 4th of ten, with 3,744 hands (13 × 4 × 12 × 6).
- Quads means four of a kind. It is 3rd of ten, with 624 hands (13 ranks × 48 choices for the fifth card).
"Set" is a close cousin of trips that is easy to misuse. In Texas Hold'em, a set is three of a kind made from a pocket pair plus one board card, and trips is made from one hole card plus a pair on the board. They are the same rank of hand but different situations, and the distinction only exists in games with shared cards. In five-card poker, where you just hold five cards, the word to use is trips.
Boats are read with the three-of-a-kind rank first: "kings full of fours" is three kings and two fours. Each trips rank can pair with 12 other ranks in 6 ways, so every "aces full" or "sevens full" has exactly 4 × 12 × 6 = 288 hands, and 13 × 288 gives the 3,744 above.
Names for one specific hand
The other nicknames pick out a narrower slice of a rank.
- Wheel (also bicycle) is the straight A-2-3-4-5, the lowest straight. Its suits can fall 45 = 1,024 ways. Four of those are all one suit, so there are 1,020 wheels that count as plain straights. It is one tenth of the 10,200 straights.
- Broadway is the highest straight, 10-J-Q-K-A, and by the same arithmetic it has 1,020 plain-straight hands too. Any other straight, from 2-3-4-5-6 to 9-10-J-Q-K, has the same 1,020.
- Steel wheel is the wheel in a single suit: a straight flush. There are 4, one per suit. Four more hands make the royal flush, the Broadway of a single suit, so the steel wheel is exactly as rare as a royal.
- Aces up is two pair with aces as the higher pair. There are 12 choices of the other pair, 6 × 6 suit choices, and 44 cards left for the fifth, so 12 × 36 × 44 = 19,008 hands. That is 12 of the 78 rank pairs that make up the 123,552 two-pair hands. "Kings up" and "queens up" work the same way with a smaller set.
The wheel is the only nickname here that changes how a hand is ordered: it is a five-high straight, so it loses to every other straight. Is the ace high or low? The ace in five-card poker covers why the ace may drop below the two only in this run.
How common each one is
Dividing 2,598,960 by each count gives the "one deal in N" figure for the chart. Trips come up about once in 47 deals and aces up once in 137. A boat is one deal in 694, and a wheel (or a Broadway) is one in 2,548. Quads are one in 4,165, and the steel wheel is one in 649,740.
| Nickname | Means | Rank (of 10) | Hands | Share of deals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trips | Three of a kind | 7th | 54,912 | 2.11% |
| Aces up | Two pair, aces the higher pair | 8th | 19,008 | 0.73% |
| Boat | Full house | 4th | 3,744 | 0.144% |
| Wheel | A-2-3-4-5, not all one suit | 6th | 1,020 | 0.039% |
| Broadway | 10-J-Q-K-A, not all one suit | 6th | 1,020 | 0.039% |
| Quads | Four of a kind | 3rd | 624 | 0.024% |
| Steel wheel | A-2-3-4-5, all one suit | 2nd | 4 | 0.00015% |
The rank column is why a boat beats a wheel and quads beat a boat: the order of the ten rows follows the order of rarity. The full table behind these counts is in How rare each five-card poker hand is.
Reading the table with care
Nicknames tell you the rank, but they do not settle a tie. Two boats are compared by the three-of-a-kind rank first, so aces full beats kings full whatever the pairs are. Two wheels tie exactly, because suits never break a tie. If you want the full set of comparison rules, the tie-break post has them.
The counts also show that a nickname can mislead about scarcity. Aces up sounds like a notable hand, yet at 19,008 hands it is about five times more common than a boat. A wheel sounds like a rare trick, but at 1,020 hands it is no scarcer than any other straight.
Where this meets Poker vs Dealer
The names above are standard poker vocabulary and the counts are standard five-card maths. Poker vs Dealer: Offline is a five-card game with its own rules that the listing says are not Texas Hold'em, and the listing mentions an in-game rules and payouts screen you can read at any time. It also says the app tracks hand categories, so the ranks in the table are the same categories you can look for in your own record. This post does not claim how often the app deals any particular hand.
Poker vs Dealer: Offline is a five-card poker game where your hand competes against the dealer and for the table pot. You can hold your hand, pay an ante to forge a card by exchanging it for a fresh one, or bail and recover half of your committed chips. It plays offline with no ads or in-app purchases, and the chips are play money with no cash value.