Explanation of Out
In poker terms, an out signifies any card still available in the deck that will finalize our hand. By determining how many outs we possess at a specific point in the game, we can develop an approximate understanding of our potential equity in the pot. For a deeper dive into this concept, refer to the glossarial definition of equity .
Example of out in a sentence -> For example, when facing a flush draw, you usually count about 9 outs .
Incorporating Outs into Your Poker Strategy
When tallying outs , it's crucial to focus solely on those that help us create the top hand most frequently. This means we should be cautious of outs that could lead to subpar hands, often dubbed as 'tainted outs '. The following illustrates this with a basic example from Hold'em.
Hand: A ♣ 5 ♥
Board: 6 ♥ 7 ♥ 8 ♥
There are numerous ways to achieve a straight or flush on the turn, precisely 15 different cards that can help (you can verify this by counting). However, relying on all these possible outs for estimating our true equity could mislead us.
The challenge lies in the fact that many of the outs we identified lead to hands that are rarely the best choice. Except for the rare straight flush outs , we shouldn't place our faith in any of the straight or flush outs as reliable. When assessing our pot-equity, it's generally wise to either discount or disregard these tainted outs . 'Discounting' means we only count a portion of that out rather than its entirety. For heavily dominated outs , we might consider just a tiny fraction.
After estimating the average number of outs that will assuredly give us the best hand, we can explore the equity glossary entry to understand how to leverage our outs for equity assessments.
See Also
Equity , Expected Value , Expectation , Pot Odds , Implied Odds , Domination