Texas Holdem – Counting Outs
Counting outs is very important in texas holdem because it is the first step to calculating our hand odds and working out whether it will be profitable to call a raise or re-raise when we have a drawing hand like four to the flush. You’d be happy to note that counting outs is actually a very simple process. After finding how many outs we have and are chances of winning the pot, we can then work out whether it will be +EV to call a raise from our peevishly aggressive opponent.
What is an Out? An “out” is the number of cards left in the deck that can complete our hand and supposedly win us the pot.
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How to Calculate Outs
If we hit the flop with 10h-Jd and the cards on the board are Qd-Ks-6h, then we have a great possibility of making straight (we actually have an open-ended straight draw).
There are two simple ways of counting our outs and calculating our “hand odds” with drawing hands like this.
1) Ratio Method
Count the number of cards left in the pack that complete your hand, out of all the possible cards left. In our example above, there are precisely 8 cards that would complete are straight (As,Ad,Ah,Ac and 9s,9d,9h,9c) out of a possible 47 (52 cards in the pack minus our pocket cards and the flop).
This gives us 52:8, in other words, our hand odds are 6.2:1.
2) Percentage Method
This is my favourite method as it’s really easy and quick to do. In fact, it only takes a matter of seconds to do. All you have to do is count the number of cards left in the deck that can complete your hand, multiple this by 2 and then add 1.
i.e. (8x2) + 1 = 17. The chance of us completing our open-ended straight and winning the pot is 17%.
Conclusion on Counting Outs
Counting outs is a fairly simple process, and even the dimmest of poker players should have no problems getting to grasp with the maths! Afterwards, you can juxtapose your hand odds with the pot odds, which enables you to determine whether it will be profitable to call a bet or not with your drawing hand. For example, if our pot odds are 20% and our hand odds are 17%, then we will make 3% profit in the long term.
If you find any of this maths beyond your level, you’ll be pleased to hear that there are a number of poker tools and calculators that can do this for you.
On a last point, you need to be careful to discount certain outs in your calculations if there’s a chance that they will increase your opponent’s hand strength too (this is also known as negative implied odds). If our opponent was drawing to the flush in the example above, then we have to discount all of the outs that complete his flush (since a flush beats a straight).
