High card by suit


High card by suit and low card by suit refer to assigning relative values to playing cards of equal rank based on their suit. When suit ranking is applied, the most common conventions from lowest to highest are:
; English alphabetical order: clubs, followed by diamonds, hearts, and spades.
; American Cards: Most Poker games avoid split pots by using the following order: spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs.
; Alternating colors: Diamonds, followed by clubs, hearts, and spades. Similar to alphabetical ranking in that the two highest rankings are occupied by the same two suits in the same relative position to one another, but differing in the two lowest rankings, which while occupied by the same two suits have their relative position to one another swapped.
; High reds: Some Russian card games like Preference, 1000 etc. use the following order: spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts.
; Low reds: Some German card games like Skat use the following order: diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs.
; Chinese-Japanese-Korean conventional order: clubs, followed by hearts, diamonds, and spades.
; Italian conventional order: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades, remembered with the mnemonic “Come Quando Fuori Piove”.

Poker

Most poker games do not rank suits; the ace of clubs is just as good as the ace of spades. However, small issues are sometimes resolved by dealing one card to each player. If two players draw cards of the same rank, one way to break the tie is to use an arbitrary hierarchy of suits. The order of suit rank differs by location; for example, the ranking most commonly used in the United States is not the one typically used in Italy.
Cards are always compared by rank first, and only then by suit. For example, using the "alphabetical order" of suits, the ace of clubs ranks higher than any king, but lower than the ace of diamonds. High card by suit is used to break ties between poker hands as a regional variance, but more commonly is used in the following situations, as well as various others, based upon the circumstances of the particular game:
  • Randomly selecting a player or players.
  • Assigning the bring-in.
  • Awarding odd chips in a split pot.
  • Breaking ties in a chip race

Contract bridge

In bridge, suit rank during the bidding phase of the game is by ascending alphabetical order.
During the play of the cards, the trump suit is superior to all other suits and the other suits are of equal rank to each other. If there is no trump suit, all suits are of equal rank.