Succeeding in Texas Hold’em poker requires many different skills. Patience, emotional control and the ability to read other people’s play are all important traits of any successful poker player. For the majority, being able to do some basic maths in order to work out equity and ranges is also important.

All those pros that you see on television are regularly crunching numbers in their heads when they are making a decision to raise, call or fold their hand. The first basic step of starting to use mathematics in poker is to know how to count outs when playing poker on the internet at a quality poker site like 888 Poker.

An out is a card that will improve your hand to become the winning hand. Because you do not know your opponents hand, you are going to have to make a read (assign him a range of probable hands) on what they are holding in order to determine how many potential outs you have to win the hand. We are going to go through the basic steps of how to count outs and then briefly look at how you can apply some mathematics to these outs.

What is a Draw?

In Texas Hold’em Poker, a draw is a hand that you must usually improve in order to win the pot (there are of course exceptions to this rule where you hold a higher draw than your opponent).

A draw may have a few or a number of cards that will improve it. The cards that help a Texas Hold’em hand improve are known as outs. In most scenarios, when playing a drawing hand, if the cards or “outs” in question hit, you will most likely beat your opponent’s hand.

There are a few draws we should concentrate on when trying to count outs because these are the most common ones. These draws are flush draws, straight draws, combination draws (the combination of a flush and a straight draw) and over cards to the board. What we have to do when we count our outs is count the amount of cards that will complete our hand. For instance, if we have a flush draw there are 2 cards of the same suit on the board and 2more in your hand. Because there are 13 cards of each suit in the deck, this means there are 9 more suited cards that could come out of the deck that would make our flush. Thus, we have 9 outs that count towards making our flush hand.

Important Outs To Remember

A flush draw has 9 outs.

An open ended straight draw has 8 outs.

A combination draw made up of a flush draw and open ended straight draw has 15 outs.

A gutshot or middle pin straight draw has 4 outs.

One over card has 3 outs.

Two over cards has 6 outs.

The outs above are common outs that you should be able to recall quickly when you are in a hand. To use them mathematically is easy. If the flop comes down and we have a flush draw which (9 outs), there are 9 cards out of 47 unknown cards to hit on the turn and 9 cards out of 46 to hit on the river. This means the percentage likelihood of us hitting our outs if we see both the turn and the river is 39% this is done by adding 9/47 to 9/46.

There is an extremely quick way to calculate our chances of winning a hand. If we take our number of outs and multiply it by 4 on the flop, or by 2 on the turn, we’ll arrive at an estimation extremely close to our actual equity.

Using the example above, if we have a flush draw on the flop, we have 9 outs to improve our hand to a flush. Thus we can quickly calculate our equity by multiplying 9×4=36%. Our actual equity in the hand is 39%, so while not spot on, it gives us a good estimation of the actual odds. Similarly, if we want to calculate our chances of hitting on the turn, we just multiply 9×2=18%.