§1. Five Crowns is a proprietary card game of the Contract Rummy family.

The playing cards furnished by the factory are similar to, but not the same as, the standard pack. Other than the cards, no equipment is needed except a means to keep score, such as pencil and paper, or an electronic device.

These cards can easily be used in the popular game Poker, and that is the focus of this report. The rationale is that the standard Poker hand contains 5 cards, which nicely aligns with the 5 suits of Five Crowns. A particular attraction is that it becomes possible to have a hand with 5 cards of the same rank, or cards in 5 different suits.

§2. Five Crowns cards have rank and suit similar to those of standard cards, with the usual addition of Jokers.

The suits, each a different color, are:

• Clubs ♣
• Diamonds ♦
• Hearts ♥
• Spades ♠
• Stars ★

The ranks of the cards are, from low to high:

• Three-Four-Five-Six-Seven-Eight-Nine-Ten-Jack-Queen-King

• 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-T-J-Q-K

Although standard playing cards include an Ace and Two, those ranks are omitted from Five Crowns packs for reasons that make sense under the factory rules for the game, which however will not be explored here.

With 5 suits and 11 ranks, there are 55 different rank-and-suit cards, and each appears twice. Meanwhile, 6 Jokers are added to make a total of 116 cards. The Poker adaptation presented here employs 55 different cards, one in each combination of rank and suit.

The Poker hands addressed here can be categorized as follows, with some categories overlapping:

The prism is so called because different suits have different colors.

Some hands fit into two categories:

• Five of a kind is necessarily a prism, but a prism is not necessarily five of a kind.
• A straight might also be a flush or a prism, but a flush cannot be a prism.
• A hand with two or more cards of the same rank might be a prism, but it cannot be a flush or a straight.

The table below shows all the possibilities, along with the number of times each would occur in a deal of five cards. Some players may not choose to recognize all of them.

For many forms of Poker, the statistics in the table above will not reveal the effective distribution of hands at showdown time, because:

• In Draw Poker, a player can trade in unsatisfactory cards for replacements that will hopefully be better.
• In many forms of Stud Poker, a player is dealt more than five cards (seven being the most common), and the player freely selects the five that will give him the best hand.
• Some forms of Poker use Community Cards, shared among all players, which each player can regard as part of his hand if desired.
• Wild Cards can be used in any form of Poker.

In any case, the seventeen hand categories from the table above are listed below in increasing order of occurence: