In Lesson 1 we covered the basics of counting outs. From the discussion it should be clear that you need to know not only what hands you can achieve, but also what hands would beat your opponent. You might think knowing your opponents cards requires mind reading abilities, but here we'll see that in many cases a simple educated guess is enough.

Straight to it then

Some situations happen often and are useful for study. A straight draw is one of those situations. It occurs so often that, without needing to count, you will simply know how many outs you have. Despite being a strong hand, a straight is susceptible to being beaten by both higher straights and flushes. There is also the occasional win by a full house or higher, though hopefully the opponent's greedy betting would give that away.

One case which is beautiful for a straight draw is the so called rainbow flop: three different suits which makes getting a flush quite unlikely. So let's consider this flop:

You are holding

and call a single bet pre-flop. Though there is no guarantee that your opponent flopped a pair, but those two face cards make it a significant possibility. No having any pair yourself you have little chance to make three of a kind. Thankfully the rainbow of suits makes a flush quite unlikely. Thus you can be fairly confident a straight would win.

Your cards form what is known as the open ended straight draw: you can get a card at either end, either the ace or nine, to complete the straight. There are 4 of each of these cards, thus you have 8 outs to complete the straight.

Be leery should the board be a single colour; somebody may have already made their flush and might trick you into thinking your straight draw is good. If they have just one of the suite, or the board has only a double suit, they may have a flush draw. If you suspect a flush draw you may wish to put in a larger bet to discourage any chasing. More on this next lesson.

What about a pair of Queens?

Potentially pairing up on the queen would also give you the pot, since your opponents pre-flop bet could be any number of hands: AX or a suited connector like JTs. Those hands would likely even call a moderate bet on the flop. Matching your queen you would win against those hands. In this case you have what are known as potential outs: outs which could potentially win the hand. Here you have 2 of them, the queens.

Flushing the set

You get A♣ T♣ pre-flop and put in a bet only to be raised by a tight aggressive player behind you. You decide to call and get a look at the flop. These cards are turned:

You check and he puts in a small bet. This seems highly suspicious as he is an aggressive player post-flop. You are facing the possibility that he hit a set with either the nines or tens. Your only likely chance to beat this would be to complete the flush. We know from last lesson that you have 9 outs to complete the flush when holding a flush draw.

Should you make the call though? This is now a question of pot odds and expected value. We can look more at this next time, but let's do it briefly here. With 9 outs you have a 19% chance to hit your card on the turn. Therefore your expected value is 19% of the pot, plus your call. If the bet is less than this value then it makes sense to call.

Counting to a known hand

Occasionally you will play an opponent and have a really good idea of what cards they have. For example if the ultra-tight player has called your pre-flop raise you might put them on a high pair or ace-king. Say that you called with Q♣ J♣ and the flop comes up:

The betting plays out so that you are reasonably certain he has pocket aces or kings. Thus your queens won't be good enough. You will need to improve. Another queen would give you the set, so 2 outs. You also have a chance at the straight if a ten comes up, so another 4 outs. A second pair, with the jacks, would also win. That adds another 3 outs. That gives you 9 outs in total.

You see that In this lesson we've done basically the same thing as last time. We are simply counting the cards required to make a certain outcome. We've gone a bit deeper into dealing with specific hands and compared that to our opponents. The following practice game will help you count outs in such specific situations.

Practice Counting Outs

You'll never know exactly what your opponent has, but it is good to count outs as though you did. In some cases simply counting your guaranteed outs for the flush, or straight, may not give you good enough odds to call. If you were however to add in the cases for a set, or two pair, you may find that calling is the right option. We'll go more into this in a future lesson.