Every Hand of the King in Game of Thrones, Ranked by Competence

There are few positions in Game of Thrones more thankless than serving as the Hand of the King. You’re the second most powerful person in the realm, theoretically, yet you’re constantly undermined, overruled, and blamed for problems that aren’t actually your fault. The Hand answers to a king who may be brilliant or may be a complete moron. The Hand must navigate council politics, manage the kingdom’s finances, oversee justice, and generally keep things from falling apart—all while the actual monarch might be off hunting, drinking, or making catastrophic decisions. Over the course of the show, we saw several different people take on this impossible role, and each brought their own style, strengths, and failures to the job. Let’s rank them by how well they actually did the work, setting aside how much we liked them as characters and judging them purely on competence.

The Rankings

1. Tyrion Lannister: The Political Genius

Here’s the thing about Tyrion as Hand—he actually accomplished things. During the War of the Five Kings, with the realm falling apart, the crown on the verge of bankruptcy, and internal enemies at every level, Tyrion managed to keep King’s Landing running, prevent multiple coups, fund the war effort, and come up with strategies that saved the city from invasion. He didn’t have a huge standing army at his back. He didn’t have unlimited resources. What he had was intelligence, the ability to think several moves ahead, and a willingness to make hard, pragmatic decisions.

Tyrion’s achievements as Hand are genuinely staggering when you really think about them. He sourced wildfire and used it effectively in defense of the city. He outwitted and outmaneuvered Littlefinger and Cersei, managing to consolidate power despite both of them actively working against him. He negotiated with the Tyrells to secure their alliance, which probably saved the Lannister position. He managed the Small Council with a mixture of authority and careful manipulation. Most impressively, he did all of this while dealing with a Small Council deliberately trying to undermine him, a queen who wanted him dead, and a crown that often didn’t understand or appreciate his strategies.

The fact that Tyrion eventually left the position wasn’t really a failure on his part—it was because he was betrayed, because the system he was fighting to preserve actually destroyed him anyway. His tenure ended in tragedy, but it didn’t end in failure. The city remained standing. The crown remained solvent, more or less. Tyrion proved that genuine intelligence and competence matter in governance, even in a fundamentally broken system. He’s the high watermark for competence in this particular role.

2. Ned Stark: Honorable But Overwhelmed

Ned Stark was an honorable man in a position that required more than honor. As Hand to Robert Baratheon, Ned inherited a kingdom in debt, with enemies at every border, and a king increasingly uninterested in the actual work of ruling. Ned didn’t have Tyrion’s political instincts or his willingness to play the game with ruthless pragmatism, but he was intelligent, experienced, and genuinely tried to do right by the kingdom.

The problem with Ned’s tenure was that he was dealing with a fundamentally corrupt system and didn’t quite understand how corrupt or how deep the rot went. He discovered the truth about Joffrey’s legitimacy and tried to handle it with honor, which was a catastrophic mistake. He believed that telling people the truth and appealing to their sense of duty would work, even when dealing with people like Cersei and Littlefinger who had neither honor nor duty. Ned’s failure was essentially one of reading the room—he didn’t understand that the game he was trying to play by different rules than everyone else, and his rivals were exploiting that.

Still, Ned wasn’t a bad Hand by any practical measure. He was trying to clean up Robert’s mess, he was investigating real corruption, and he was attempting to prevent war. His mistake was being honest in a den of vipers, not being incompetent at the actual job. If he’d been a bit more Machiavellian, if he’d been willing to compromise his principles, he might have been quite effective. Instead, he was honest, and honesty got him killed and destroyed the realm.

3. Davos Seaworth: The Honest Pragmatist

Davos served as an advisor and Hand of sorts to Stannis Baratheon, and while his tenure was relatively brief, he demonstrated real competence in the role. Davos was intelligent, practical, and genuinely believed in doing right by the people he governed. He had experience with logistics, trade, and the actual mechanics of keeping a kingdom functioning. He wasn’t dealing with as complex a political landscape as Tyrion or Ned, partly because Stannis’s court was smaller and more loyal, but Davos made the best of his position.

The main issue with Davos was that he was serving Stannis, a man whose legitimacy was questionable and whose reliance on magic and prophecy made him increasingly unstable. Davos tried to counsel pragmatism and actual governance, but he was constantly fighting against Stannis’s obsession with prophecy and his willingness to sacrifice anything in the name of destiny. Davos wasn’t a failure; rather, he was competent and realistic in a situation that was inherently doomed by his king’s character. If Davos had served a stable, reasonable monarch, he probably would have been an excellent Hand.

4. Jon Snow: Reluctant and Unprepared

Jon Snow never served as Hand in the traditional sense, but as Lord Commander and later as King in the North, he held positions of authority requiring similar governance skills. Jon’s record as a leader was mixed at best. He made some good decisions and some catastrophic ones. His insistence on taking the fight to the White Walkers was probably correct in hindsight, but his inability to manage his own people, his tendency to see issues in black and white terms, and his occasional bouts of indecision made him a middling leader at best.

Jon’s main problem was that he didn’t have the political sophistication or the ruthlessness that the job actually requires. He tried to lead with honor, which is admirable, but he also got himself killed for it, which rather proves the point that honor alone isn’t enough. When he was resurrected and took charge of the North again, he showed some improvement, but he was still fundamentally someone who trusted people more readily than circumstances warranted and who sometimes made decisions based on what he felt was right rather than what was strategically sound.

5. Qyburn: Competent But Morally Bankrupt

Qyburn is an interesting case because he was technically competent in many ways. He showed innovation, problem-solving skills, and a willingness to think outside conventional boundaries. As Master of Whispers and later as Hand to Cersei, he demonstrated an understanding of how to gather intelligence and consolidate power. His creation of the Mountain zombie was grotesque, certainly, but it was also effective.

The issue with Qyburn is that his competence was entirely in service of a genuinely terrible woman’s genuinely terrible goals. He helped Cersei blow up the Sept, he raised the dead, he built weapons of mass destruction. He had the skills and intelligence to be an excellent Hand under the right circumstances, but under Cersei’s rule, he was essentially an enabler of tyranny and destruction. You can be technically competent at governance while being morally catastrophic, and Qyburn is the perfect example of that contradiction.

6. Kevan Lannister: The Competent Placeholder

Kevan Lannister served briefly as Hand to Tommen after the chaos of Cersei’s rule and before Cersei seized power again. He demonstrated genuine competence—he was organized, pragmatic, and focused on actually rebuilding the kingdom rather than pursuing personal vendettas. His brief tenure showed that stability and competence could be restored relatively quickly if someone just tried to govern responsibly.

The reason Kevan ranks below the others isn’t because he was incompetent; it’s because his tenure was so brief and so interrupted. He didn’t have time to accomplish much or to be tested by genuine crisis. But everything he did do suggested he would have been a solid, workmanlike Hand—not brilliant like Tyrion, not as honorable as Ned, but competent and focused on the kingdom’s actual needs.

7. Cersei Lannister: Smart But Destructive

Cersei was intelligent and politically savvy, but as Hand she was a disaster. She was so focused on consolidating personal power, punishing perceived enemies, and protecting her children that she completely lost sight of what was actually good for the kingdom. She made decisions based on pride rather than pragmatism, she alienated allies unnecessarily, and she consistently chose the option that would hurt her enemies at the expense of the realm’s stability.

Cersei could have been an effective political operator if she’d been willing to separate personal grievances from governmental policy. Instead, she used the position almost entirely for personal vendetta. Her handling of the Faith, her relationship with the Tyrells, her approach to the Dornish conflict—all of these were driven more by her personal emotions than by any actual strategy. She’s an example of someone with political intelligence but lacking the discipline and perspective required to actually govern effectively.

8. Robert Baratheon: Not Actually a Hand, But Worth Mentioning

Robert wasn’t technically a Hand, but it’s worth noting that he delegated the actual running of the kingdom to other people while he pursued pleasure, which is perhaps the most honest acknowledgment that he had no business being king. As far as the position of king goes, he was catastrophically incompetent, which is why we get Hands trying to clean up his messes.

Lessons From the Hands

Looking across all these different people in the position, a few patterns emerge. The most effective Hands were the ones who understood that the job required pragmatism and political intelligence, not just honor or ambition. Tyrion succeeded because he was willing to make hard choices and manipulate people if necessary. Ned failed partly because he wasn’t willing to do those things. Jon Snow struggled because he wanted to lead by example and principle rather than by necessity and strategy.

It’s also worth noting that being Hand of the King is nearly impossible when your king is incompetent or unstable. Tyrion was dealing with a child king and a queen who actively undermined him, and he still found ways to be effective. But the structural problems with monarchy itself meant that even the most competent Hand was always limited by the whims of a single person. Davos knew this. Ned didn’t. Cersei certainly didn’t care.

The position revealed something fundamental about the show’s central themes—that individual competence and virtue matter, but they’re also constrained by systems that don’t value those things. The best Hands in Westeros couldn’t overcome the fundamental instability of absolute monarchy, the corruption of the realm’s institutions, or the simple fact that they had to answer to kings who were often their moral and intellectual inferiors. They did what they could with an impossible job, and history will judge them accordingly.