What would be the best way to go about making a 5 card draw poker game?

language is C++ =P sorry

You need an array to hold the "hand" of cards, and then a routine to go and look for matches (the easiest way to do that is to put them in order).

Start with an array with the 52 cards, The "card" needs 2 values: what card it is and a bool indicating if it's already used or not.
select for each player 5 random cards. You only need to know what card it is. Then apply the rules on those sets of cards. This can be done by a serie of searches. Sorting them first, like Gian said, can seriously speed this up. But it basicaly comes down to comparing numbers to find pairs, streets, etc.

RedX

Useing a "struct" would work pretty well. :)

You should think about how you would divide the process of playing poker into smaller, easily written steps.

A flowchart program like Visio can be very useful when planning out programs.

If you want to design your program thoroughly I would suggest using UML tools, like Rational Rose. I know it might be a serious overkill for something like poker, but the best way to learn is to do so on a small (read: not too complicated) project. And you can form some nice habits too :)

(hope I'm not generating too much noise here)