How to count your outs

If there is one thing you need to know when playing poker it is your outs. How many outs do you have and what are your percentages of hitting your out(s)? An out, put simply, is the number of cards in the deck that can make your hand. For instance: If you are on a flush draw you have 9 outs. You have the 2 flush cards in your hand and there are 2 flush cards on the board. That leaves 9 cards that can make your hand remaining. Of course this does not take into account how many of those nine have been dealt to other players. You may now want to calculate your chances of hitting one of those nine outs. That is fairly easy to do. Simply multiply your number of outs, in this case 9, times 4. You will then have the percentages of hitting your hand. In this case it’s 36%.

Let’s calculate an open ended straight draw. In this case you have 8 outs that can make your straight if you hold JT and the board is KQ. That makes for any Ace or Nine in the deck knowing that there are 4 Aces and 4 Nines in the deck you have 8 outs. Now we can multiply our 8 outs X’s 4 to get our percentages of making the hand which is 32%.

It is critical that you know your outs and be able to perform these calculations on the fly. To a good player they are second nature. You wanna be a really good poker player? Always know your way out.

Deuces,

CIII

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