Dead man's hand Dead man's hand The dead man's hand is a nickname for a particular poker hand, popularly a two-pair of black aces and black eights, although definitions of the hand have varied through the years. Such a hand is said to have been held by Old West folk hero, lawman, and gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok when he was murdered. No contemporaneous source records this hand's exact cards, but Frank Wilstach's 1926 book "Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of Pistoleers" led to the popular modern conception of the "dead man's hand" as containing pairs of black aces and black eights. In Hickok's
Poker probability of the time that a player can select a 5-card low hand without any pair. If aces are not low, simply rotate the hand descriptions so that 6-high replaces 5-high for the best hand and ace-high replaces king-high as the worst hand. Poker probability In poker, the probability of each type of 5-card hand can be computed by calculating the proportion of hands of that type among all possible hands. Probability and gambling have been an idea since long before the invention of poker. The development of probability theory in the late 1400s was attributed to gambling; when playing a