A flush draw has nine outs, the remaining cards of its suit. An open-ended straight draw has eight. A gutshot has four.
Counting outs is the easy part. Converting them is where the standard shortcut fails: the rule of 4 and 2 says multiply by four with two cards to come, and it overstates a 15-out draw by nearly six percentage points, because it double-counts rivers on draws the turn already completed.
Outs also need discounting. A card that completes your flush may hand someone a full house on a paired board, and a straight card that puts three to a flush out there is worth less than a clean one. The count is a starting point, not an answer.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in poker
- Pot odds — The price a call is getting, compared against how often it needs to win.
- Equity — Your share of the pot, meaning how often you win it if the hand plays to showdown.
- Implied odds — The money you expect to win later if your draw comes in, beyond what is in the pot now.
- Position — Where you act in the betting order, and the largest structural edge in poker.
- Button — The dealer position, which acts last on every postflop street.
- Cutoff — The seat immediately to the right of the button.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.