Short Deck hand rankings: the rules that make six-plus its own game
Preflop Edge guide · rules explanation. For measured win rates, see the top 20 Short Deck starting hands.
In short: Short Deck (a.k.a. Six-plus, a.k.a. Turkish poker) deletes every card below the six, leaving a 36-card deck. Two ranking consequences follow almost mechanically: a flush beats a full house, and A-6-7-8-9 counts as a straight (the wheel). A third rule varies by room — some play K-A-A-K-K (or any three-of-a-kind-plus-pair shape) as a "real" full house only when you genuinely hold a trips-plus-pair; this guide sticks to the two universal rules and the arithmetic that forces them.
The four structural changes
- 36 cards, four sixes fewer per suit. Every suit loses its 2, 3, 4 and 5; the deck holds 36 cards. Fewer outs everywhere: straights and flushes are rarer as made hands, but as draws they are everywhere, because remaining cards cluster in the 6-to-A window.
- The flush beats the full house. This is not a stylistic choice, it is scarcity pricing (see the counting section). A flopped flush draw with one card to come is one of Short Deck's signature races.
- A-6-7-8-9 is a straight. With no deuces through fives, the wheel re-anchors at the bottom: A-6-7-8-9 (and by extension A-6-7-8-x backdoor shapes) become live straight logic. Some rooms also treat it as the lowest straight only, not interchangeable with A-5 — read the specific room's rules.
- Trips beats a straight (room-dependent, check before you buy in). Because straights proliferate, many Short Deck rulesets rank seven-or-better trips above a straight, and a handful go further (flushes above full houses and straights above flushes). The two-point rule set in this guide's "In short" box is the most common casino configuration.
Why flushes beat full houses: count with me
In a 52-card deck there are four of each rank, so you often hold two cards that match a board card — full houses pile up. In 36 cards there are still four of each rank but fewer ranks, and, crucially, every hand is built from two hole cards and five board cards exactly as in Hold'em. What changed is the density: with ranks 6 through A only, your two random cards are far more likely to connect with the board in some way (pair + draw + backdoor shapes), so the made-hand ladder compresses — "rare" monsters like full houses stop being rare, and if they kept their Hold'em rank they would dominate the game into a one-hand game. Dropping the full house a tier re-balances the ladder: what used to be "the nuts-ish" now loses to a draw that completed. If you carry Hold'em instincts into Short Deck without updating them, you will under-value exactly two things: ace-high flush draws (a hand like A-x suited now has two jobs — top pair or the nut-ish flush) and connected middle shapes like 8-9 suited or J-9, whose straight and flush engines fire on far too many flops to be folded for a single raise.
Transferring your Hold'em intuition (no hand-level numbers here, on purpose)
- Everything is worth more "with a draw." In Hold'em we measure ragged hands on the 169-hand rankings page in a single column (see the A-A guide or J-T suited / T-9 suited for how far those percentages fall in a crowd); in Short Deck the same shapes climb because both your straight and flush routes widened.
- Pairs remain strong — but "my pair is overpaid soon" is the default fear. A hold'em overpair like Q-Q or J-J (for the Hold'em baseline compare J-T suited or T-9 suited) is already ahead on many Short Deck boards and usually not stackable twice; the game's whole texture punishes "I'll get married to top pair."
- Short-deck counting is a skill you can drill. The Preflop Edge Short Deck Study Pack ($19 one-time) ships its own Short Deck matrix, range tools and cheat sheet; this guide is rules-text only because we publish no measured Short Deck equity table until ours is verified to six-decimal precision against the site's simulation set — a Top-20 Short Deck ladder is queued as a follow-up once that data is trusted.
Before you sit down
- Confirm the room's exact ranking list (where do full houses, flushes and trips sit; does A-6-7-8-9 play as a straight both ways).
- Re-anchor your preflop instincts: hands whose value in Hold'em came from "top pair, no draw" are the ones that drop the most; hands built from draws and wheel-straight logic are the ones that rise.
- Play the Short Deck Trainer and matrix in the Study Pack long enough to own the new ladder; the PLO guide is the companion when you cross back over to four-card games.