What is the dead man's hand in poker?

Two pair, aces and eights, usually given as the two black aces and the two black eights. It is the hand Wild Bill Hickok is said to have held when he was shot.

What cards are in the dead man's hand?

The ace of spades, the ace of clubs, the eight of spades and the eight of clubs, plus a fifth card. Which fifth card is not known: accounts name the nine of diamonds, several queens, the jack of diamonds, the deuce of spades and the five of diamonds, and one theory says he held only four cards.

Who died holding aces and eights?

Wild Bill Hickok, according to the legend. Jack McCall shot him during a poker game in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, on August 2, 1876. No record from the time says what his cards were.

Why is it called the dead man's hand?

People link it to the story of Hickok's death, but that link came later. The phrase was in print in the 1880s, for more than one hand and with no mention of him, and Frank J. Wilstach's 1926 biography made aces and eights its fixed meaning.

How rare is the dead man's hand?

Any two aces and two eights come 1 time in 1,641 in five cards, 1,584 of 2,598,960 hands. The black aces and black eights with any fifth card come 1 time in 59,067.

What does aces and eights mean?

It means the dead man's hand: two pair, aces and eights. Film and song use it as an omen of death, after the Hickok story.

Dead Man's Hand in Poker: The Story and the Odds

Q: Is the dead man's hand a good hand?

Yes. In five cards it beats 96.90% of the other hands as dealt. In Hold'em at showdown, a hand whose best five is aces and eights beats one random hand 70.82% of the time and three random hands 43.4%. Against one hand the figure is exact; against three it is simulated.

What is the dead man's hand?

Two pair, aces and eights: the ace of spades, the ace of clubs, the eight of spades and the eight of clubs in the version everyone knows, plus a fifth card nobody can be sure of. Poker players call any two aces and two eights by the same names, the dead man's hand or simply aces and eights. It ranks as two pair, below three of a kind, but near the top of its class: among two pair only aces with kings, queens, jacks, tens or nines rank higher. Another hand with a name of its own is 10-2, the Doyle Brunson hand.

The story: Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood, August 2, 1876

James Butler Hickok, the gunfighter and lawman known as Wild Bill, was playing poker at Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. He liked to sit with his back to a wall, and that day the only open seat faced away from the door. He asked to change seats and was refused. Jack McCall, who had lost heavily at the same table the day before, walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head with a revolver. A miners' jury acquitted McCall, who said he was avenging a brother. He was then rearrested, tried again at Yankton, the territorial capital, found guilty, and hanged on March 1, 1877. That is Wikipedia's account, the fullest we found. Britannica's entry gives the same date and place for the shooting and the same date for the hanging, but puts the retrial at Laramie, where other accounts have McCall rearrested before being tried at Yankton. The cards are a different matter.

What Hickok was really holding

Nobody knows. Joseph Rosa, Hickok's biographer, reported that no reference to the cards from the time has been found. Aces and eights attaches to Hickok in Frank J. Wilstach's 1926 biography, Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of Pistoleers, fifty years after the shooting. Wilstach had it from Ellis T. "Doc" Peirce, the Deadwood barber who prepared the body, and PokerNews calls that the only witness account to name the hand. The accounts do not even agree on the game: some say five-card draw and others five-card stud. So treat the hand as a legend with a real death behind it, not as a record of what was on the table.

What was the fifth card? The accounts disagree

No one can say, and the claims do not agree. Here are the main claims, with how each five-card hand would stand against every other five-card hand, as dealt, with no draw:

The fifth card, and what each version is worth

Fifth card	Who names it	Beats
Nine of diamonds	A display in Deadwood shows it, and the Las Vegas Advisor says Saloon No. 10 claims it	96.90%
Queen of clubs	The version biographer Joseph Rosa calls the accepted one, while saying nothing from the time supports it	96.87%
Queen of hearts	Carl Breihan's Wild Women of the West, from the son of a man said to have picked the cards up	96.89%
Jack of diamonds	Joseph Rosa, as the Straight Dope reports it, with a note that the card is disputed	96.90%
Queen of diamonds	Other sources, per the same report	96.89%
Deuce of spades	Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope. The Las Vegas Advisor also lists it, from other sources	96.85%
Five of diamonds	Other sources, per the Las Vegas Advisor	96.90%
None	A theory: he had discarded and was waiting for his draw, so he held four cards	n/a

Each hand is counted against all 1,533,939 five-card hands the other 47 cards can make, so these are exact. The spread is 96.85% to 96.90%: as a kicker the fifth card hardly matters, and it only decides a showdown against someone else with aces and eights.

Why it is called the dead man's hand

In print the name comes after Hickok, and the link to him later still. The earliest citation found is from 1886, ten years after the shooting, with no mention of him, and the phrase meant different hands in different places. Aces and eights was one of those meanings by 1888, still without Hickok, and the link to him appears only in the 1920s. Wilstach's book then fixed it: until then the phrase could mean jacks and eights as easily as aces and eights.

What the phrase meant in print

Year	Where	The dead man's hand was
1886	Boston Daily Globe; Grand Forks Daily Herald	Three jacks and a pair of tens
1888	Atchison Daily Globe (Kansas)	Aces and eights
1900	North Adams Transcript, from the New York Sun	Tens and treys
1903	Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences	Jacks and sevens
1907	Hoyle's Games	Jacks and eights
1926	Frank J. Wilstach, Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of Pistoleers	Aces and eights, tied to Hickok

From the citations gathered by the word historian Barry Popik, Cecil Adams's Straight Dope and Wikipedia. None of the entries before the 1920s mentions Hickok. Popik goes further and calls the poker game itself a modern myth; Wikipedia, Britannica and History.com all have him playing poker. The exact first use of a phrase like this can always be pushed back, so read these as early examples.

Odds of being dealt the dead man's hand

In five cards, choose two of the four aces (6 ways), two of the four eights (6 ways) and any of the other 44 cards, which gives 1,584 hands. That is 0.06% of all five-card hands, and 1.28% of the 123,552 that are two pair. The black version fixes four cards, so only the fifth varies: 44 hands. In Hold'em you have seven cards to choose from, and aces and eights ends up as your best hand 0.32% of the time.

How often the hand comes, exact

Hand	Cards	Hands	Out of	Odds
Aces and eights, any suits	Five cards	1,584	2,598,960	1 in 1,641
Black aces and eights, any fifth card	Five cards	44	2,598,960	1 in 59,067
Aces and eights as your best hand	Seven cards, Hold'em by the river	426,060	133,784,560	1 in 314
All four black cards among your seven	Seven cards, Hold'em by the river	17,296	133,784,560	1 in 7,735

The five-card counts are arithmetic on the deck. The seven-card row comes from a sweep of every deal, and it leaves out hands with aces and eights where something better plays, such as a flush. The last row counts every seven-card hand that holds the four black cards, whatever else it makes.

Is the dead man's hand a good hand?

Yes. As dealt in five cards with a nine beside it, it beats 1,486,444 of the 1,533,939 other hands, 96.90%, ties 3 and loses to 47,492. In Hold'em it depends on how you made it. Across every deal, a hand whose best five is aces and eights beats one random hand 70.82% of the time, against 64.25% for two pair as a whole. If you hold ace-eight yourself and both cards pair the board it wins 88.87%. If the board made most of it, other players share it or beat it, which is why the first figure is so much lower. More players cost it a lot:

Aces and eights at showdown against random hands

Opponents	Any: wins	Any: ties	Holding A-8: wins	Holding A-8: ties	Method
1	70.82%	5.29%	88.87%	0.40%	Exact
2	54.9%	5.6%	79.7%	0.7%	Simulated
3	43.4%	5.6%	72.0%	1.0%	Simulated
4	34.8%	5.4%	65.4%	1.2%	Simulated
5	28.3%	5.1%	59.7%	1.3%	Simulated
6	23.3%	4.6%	54.7%	1.5%	Simulated
7	19.3%	4.2%	50.3%	1.6%	Simulated
8	16.2%	3.7%	46.3%	1.7%	Simulated

"Any" means your best five cards are aces and eights, however you made them; "Holding A-8" means your two hole cards are an ace and an eight. These are win rates, not equity: ties have their own columns. Every (hand, board) deal was visited once, 2,598,960 boards with 1,081 holdings each. Against one hand each deal met all 990 possible holdings, so that row is exact. Against more, each deal drew one random set of opponents from a fixed seed, and the standard error stays at or below 0.04 points.

Random hands flatter it

Those opponents never fold. A real opponent who gets to showdown has usually got something. Suppose the other player holds only the best quarter of the holdings on that board: then any aces and eights wins 20.98% and loses 72.43%, and ace-eight held in the hand wins 55.80% and loses 42.63%. These are exact counts too. So two pair is a strong hand with few players left and an ordinary one when someone is betting into you, as the good hand guide shows for every hand. None of this says how Hickok's hand stood, because nothing records his opponents' cards.

Playing ace-eight in Hold'em today

As a starting hand ace-eight is an ace with a weak kicker. You are dealt one of its 16 combinations 1 time in 82.9, and it ends as aces and eights on 5.03% of boards, about 1 in 19.9. Against random hands it does well, and that is the trap: every bigger ace dominates it, so against a real raising range it is behind. All in against the site's under-the-gun opening range, A8o has about 34% equity and A8s about 38%.

Ace-eight against random hands, equity

Hand	vs 1	vs 3	vs 5
A8o	59.87%	29.9%	19.2%
A8s	61.94%	33.5%	23.2%

This table is equity, your share of the pot with ties split, not a win rate. Against one hand it is an exact count; against three and five it is simulated, with a standard error under 0.02 points. Against the range the figure is simulated too, 60,000 seeded deals per pair of hand classes, so read it to the nearest whole point.

What the charts do with it

The site's range library opens A8s from every seat at 6-max and A8o from the cutoff, the button and the small blind. The heads-up push/fold chart shoves both from the small blind at every stack from 1 to 30 big blinds. Each has its own page: A8o and A8s.

Aces and eights in film and song

The phrase left the poker table long ago, and film and song use aces and eights as a sign that someone's time is up.

•Film: in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), a doomed outlaw holds aces and eights before the last gunfight with John Wayne's character.
•Song: Motörhead's Ace of Spades mentions the dead man's hand, and Bob Dylan's Rambling, Gambling Willie tells of a gambler shot at the table holding it.