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Poker Outs Explained

 

Only starting out with poker in 2020?

I remember when I started with poker, I found remembering the important parts of the game challenging.

But your journey can become easier with this printable poker cheat sheet for beginners (I wish I had this when starting out!).

One of the most common situations concerning outs is when you have four to a flush on the flop. This leaves nine outs to complete the flush. Each suit has 13 cards and you have four of them, leaving nine outs. But will each of the nine cards guarantee a win? Texas Hold’em poker is everywhere these days — on TV, online, and in clubs and casinos. Before you sit down to a game of Texas Hold ’em, make sure you’re in good shape to be successful — take care of non-poker issues and check your physical, mental, and financial status. During the game, you need. Because the poker boom happened 15+ years ago, the number of informational products and articles that have been created since then has helped speed up the learning of the game. This factor has helped to level out the playing field and skill gap between pros and recreational players. Find out more about Texas Hold’em games here.

Table Of Contents

  • How To Use This Texas Holdem Poker Cheat Sheet.
  • How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing River Bet Example
  • How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing Flop Bet Example
  • Poker Hands Cheat Sheet: Best Texas Hold em Hands

Poker Cheat Sheet For Texas Holdem:

Download the high-quality Poker Cheat Sheet printable (PDF) version:

The cheat sheet includes hyperlinks for further reading on any material you may not yet know.

Click here for more information on pre-flop and post-flop. We also discuss Texas Holdem bet sizing in the highlighted link.

If you like the cheat sheet, you may also enjoy these these awesome starting hand charts from upswing poker. They are a more detailed version of the starting hands section in the cheat sheet above which supplement it nicely. Amazingly they have been downloaded almost 200,000 times!

How To Use This Texas Holdem Poker Cheat Sheet.

Step 1: Find your hand on the chart (example KT suited)

Step 2: Determine whether you should follow coloured or number schematic.

Either:

Poker Outs Explained
  • If first to raise (no other player has raised before you), follow the coloured schematic.
  • If facing a raise or reraise, follow the numbered schematic.

Note: If playing on a 6max table (6 players as opposed to 9), the yellow coloured hands will also be able to be played from any position.

See the image below for the numbered and colour schematic.

Step 3: Take into account information give under headings preflop and post flop.

How to play poker preflop is a tough subject to cover in detail. There are many factors you need to take into account such as:

  • Your position and your opponents position.
  • Your opponents likely holdings
  • Board texture
  • Previous history

A brief explanation of why position is powerful and why we play fewer hands when there are more players left to act (still with a hand):

When playing on a fullring table, you will have to contend with nine players, who each have a chance of picking up a big hand. Therefore, when playing a full ring game, you will play fewer hands. You can read more on this concept at fullring vs. 6max.

The difference in player numbers is also why we play a wide range of hands from the Button, but very few hands from UTG (first position). When opening the Button, we only have two players left to act (unlikely for them to have a strong hand), whereas when playing from UTG in a full ring game, eight other players could potentially pick up a big hand.

For more in-depth details on this see Texas Holdem Strategy and Position is King!

Step 4: Take home some cash

Hopefully, this poker cheat sheet will help you ‘bring home the bacon' as they say, but there is always something more to learn in poker. Keep reading for some more cheat sheets which might be of use to you.

Get Your Miniature (Credit Card Sized) Texas Holdem Starting Hands Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet only contains the most vital information you need so it can handily fit in your pocket. The legends have also been squeezed onto the hand chart in front of hands we always fold.

Poker Outs Explained Poker

To download printable PDF which is scaled to credit card size, use the Facebook unlock button:

Poker Odds Cheat Sheet (for Texas Hold'em)

Get your pot odds cheat sheet below. You can use this to determine the number of outs required to continue based on the pot odds you are being offered. You can also use it to convert between percentages, required outs and ratios for all kinds of situations in poker. The pot odds cheat sheet is explained in more detail below:

Click here to get a high-quality printable pdf version of the Poker Odds Cheat Sheet.

When your opponent bets you will be offered odds based on the size of his bet. For example, if your opponent bets half pot you will be offered odds of 3:1 on a call (call 1 to win 3). Essentially, it is your risk to reward ratio.

Pot odds will tell you whether is it correct for you to call or fold based on what size our opponent bet and how many cards that will improve our hand.

If you are interested in the learning poker math, check out our best poker books recommendation page here for some awesome books on poker math.

How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing River Bet Example

1. Work out pot odds

In this hand, our opponent bets $26 into a $41.5 pot making the total pot size $67.5. This gives us odds of 67.5: 26 (67.5 = 41.5+26). Or approximately 2.6:1. You can also see how to convert this into a percentage in our article pot odds.

2. Find 2.6:1 on the card (or as close to it as possible).

We locate 2.6:1 on the chart tells us that 2.6:1 translates to 30.11% pot equity. In other words:

  • if we win 30% of the time, we will break even,
  • if we win > 30% of the time we will make a profit on average in this situation
  • if we win <30% of the time, we will make a loss on average in this situation

3. Determine our actual equity

This is the tough part, unfortunately.

You have to estimate how often you are beaten by your opponent in order to determine if you can profitably call or not. To do this you can use a program such as equilab to plug in hands that you think your opponent may have and the hand that you currently hold. To learn more about estimating what your opponent may be holding see the article poker hand range: the comprehensive beginner guide. From the example above, we plug in some hands we think our opponent may have and see that we have 34% equity:

4. Determine if we can profitably call.

Since our equity is greater than our pot odds, we can profitably call the river bet. If our equity were less than the pot odds being offered, we would have to fold as we cannot c call.

How To Use This Pot Odds Cheat Sheet – Facing Flop Bet Example

Let's take a similar situation (confronted with a bet), except this time we are on the flop with KQs, and we have a flush draw with nine outs. A King and Queen which could be considered outs, but they aren't clean outs. This means even if we hit our hand we still may not win (say for example our opponent has AA).

1. Work out equity percentage:

Since we have nine clean outs, we can simply go to the number 9 on the card and then determine our equity.

This means that we need a minimum pot odds of 1.9:1 or 38% when we have nine outs on the flop with two cards still to come.

3. Compare pot odds to odds given by bettor.

Our equity is 38%, so we need pot odds of less than 38%. The lower the pot odds, the more profitable the call.

Our pot odds are 12.5/33 which is 37%, and hence we just about have the pot odds to call. However, we are also in positon (and will act last with more information) and have two overcards to the board (both a King and Queen will make top pair good kicker). So this is an easy call.

4. Further reading

We need seven outs to continue, and we have nine outs with a flush draw. See calculating outs for more details.

For more information on how to use this poker cheat sheet see poker and pot odds.

This video will also be useful to you:

Poker Outs Explained

Poker Hands Cheat Sheet: Best Texas Hold em Hands

In case you aren't familiar with the hand strengths, and hand rankings of poker check out the printout Texas Holdem hands cheat sheet:

(You may also be interested in the rules of texas hold em)

There are a few important things to remember when memorising at the poker hand rankings:

Best Five Cards Win

In poker, it is always the best five cards wins. This means it is not only the pairs that matter if there is no clear winner (nobody has a pair), the decision will go down to high card wins.

Kickers

Kickers decide the winning hand when two opponents have the same pair or three of a kind. For example, if one opponent has AQ (ace-queen) and another has AJ, the opponent with AQ would win on an A7522 board as he has the five card hand of AAQ75 whereas the second opponent has AAJ75.

Split Pots

Split pots occur when opponents have the same hand. For example, imagine one opponent has A4 and the other A3 on AQ752 board. Both opponents would have five card hand of AAQ75. Neither the 4 or 3 would play.

You can get more information about hand rankings on our web page here.

If you are more visually inclined, check out this video on poker hand rankings:

For more on Texas Hold'em strategy, see poker 101.

Make sure you check out the fan favourite posts:

Common poker mistakes & Texas Holdem Poker Tips

Good luck at the poker tables with your new poker cheat sheet!

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How to count outs is one of the first things people learn when they pick up a poker book or are taught the game by a friend. When played properly poker is a game of making good decisions based on the odds you are being offered. Whether or not a decision is a good one often comes down to your equity in the hand or to simplify a little, your chance of winning at showdown.

What are Outs?

In the simplest possible terms, an out is a card that may come on a future street that is very likely to give you the winning hand. For example if you are all-in pre-flop against an opponent and you hold KhKs against his AsAd then your primary outs are the two remaining Kings in the deck, which will give you a set.

Another example would be if you are facing a bet on all-in bet on the flop with 7d8d on a board of 9sTsAh. You can be reasonably confident that you can be reasonably confident that any Jack or 6 will give you the winning hand. There are four of each card still in the deck, so you have a total of 8 outs in this situation, unless of course your opponent has KQ in which case the Jack would give him a higher straight.

Poker Outs Explained Games

How to Count Outs

There are some common scenarios in which you should be able to recall off the top of your head how many outs you have. In the example where we held KK above it’s fairly obvious that there are two Kings left in the deck and so we have two outs, but what about drawing hands. Here is a list of typical drawing hands and how many outs they have:

Flush Draw: There are 13 cards of each suit in the deck. If you flop a flush draw, there will be two in your hand and two on the board, leaving a total of 9 cards in the deck which will give you a flush

Open Ended Straight Draw: In the hand where we held 7d8d above we had an open-ended straight draw where any Jack or six made our straight. As mentioned there are 4 cards of each rank in the deck for a total of 8 outs. Note that a flush draw is slightly stronger than an open ended straight draw.

Gutshot Straight Draw: If we held JsQs on a board of 8d9h2d then we have a gutshot straight draw, where only a ten will give us a straight. As we know, there are four tens in the deck so we have a total of four outs.

Double-Gutshot Straight Draw: Double gutshots are sometimes a little more difficult to recognise. An example would be holding 9s8s on a 5d7dJh board. In this case a six or a ten gives us a straight meaning that, as with the open-ended straight draw, we have eight outs.

Counting Outs in More Complicated Situations

There are a couple of situations in poker where counting outs isn’t so straightforward:

A Set vs. a Flush: If you’re unlucky enough to get all in on the flop with a set against an opponent that has flopped a flush, you still have a pretty good chance at winning. Let’s say you hold 3s3d on a 3h5hAh board and your opponent has KhQh. You can still overtake him by making a full house or quads. In this situation you are looking to hit the lone three in the deck or hoping that that the Ace or the five pair. There are three of each left in the deck giving you a total of 7 outs.

Overcards: Sometimes you’ll be faced with a situation where even making a pair will win you the hand. Say you hold Ah3h on a Th5h8s board and your opponent goes all-in after re-raising you pre-flop, and you have a strong suspicion that he has an over pair. In this case AA is unlikely so you think he has JJ-KK most of the time. In this situation, as well as your flush outs, even hitting and Ace will win you the hand, so you can add the three Aces remaining in the deck to your outs. Of course, occasionally he will have AA, or a hand like TT and your Ace outs won’t be good. This is where counting outs gets a little more tricky. To account for these times you might just take one or two of the Aces as clean outs to account for the times where hitting an Ace isn’t going to win you the hand.

Poker Outs Explained Rules

The Application of Outs to Your Play

Now that you know how to calculate how many outs you have in a hand, how can you use this information to benefit you? There is a simple rule for converting outs into your percentage chance of winning the hand.

On the flop, multiply the number of outs you have by 4.
On the turn, multiply the number of outs you have by 2.

Poker Outs Explained Game

So taking an example, if you have an open-ended straight draw which you know gives you eight outs, then on the flop you have a 4 x 8 = 32% chance of winning the hand. If you miss, then on the turn you have a 16% chance of winning the hand. You can then apply this information to the size of the pot and make your decision based on the information available to you. If your opponent bets all-in for $100 in a pot of $100 and you have an open ended straight draw, you can combine the pots odds you are getting with your chances of winning the hand. In this case, you’re being offered 2/1 meaning you need to win the hand 33% of the time to break even, but your draw only has a 32% chance of hitting, so making this call will be a marginal loser of money in the long run. If the pot is smaller and your opponent has bet less, then you can factor in the money you might win on future streets into your decision on whether or not to continue with your draw.