Texas Hold'em Math 08

Calculating Discounted Odds

Calculating the number of outs in order to make a hand is rather easy. But a problem arises when one of YOUR outs is also one of your OPPONENT'S outs. This changes the calculation considerably.

For example, let's say you're holding:

And let's say the flop reads:

You have an open-ended straight draw. Normally, that means you have eight outs. However, let's say you put your OPPONENT on a club flush draw. Let's say he's holding:

That means if an eight of clubs or a King of clubs hits the board, your opponent will have the FLUSH and you'll have the straight. Since OUTS refers to cards that can give you the WINNING HAND, the eight and King of clubs are no longer "outs" for you… since they give you a losing hand.

This information brings the number of outs down to six.

This concept is called "discounted odds", because you're DISCOUNTING cards that will help someone else's hand.

Now, of course, you don't necessarily KNOW if someone has the club draw in our example, but based on a player's betting patterns and history of play you might be able to INFER that he does. This type of decision making is where the ability to READ players meets with the ability to do poker math.

One of the important parts of discounting relates to how many players are at the table. Let's say you're sitting at a 10-man table and five players see the flop. Well, this unusually high number of players would suggest that at least one or two… quite possibly more… of the Aces are in other players' hands.

If you need an Ace as one of your "outs", it would be smart to DISCOUNT a couple of them from your calculation. Instead of saying you have four outs (for all four aces), you'd calculate the number with one or two outs… since "common sense" tells you that other players have some Aces.

Once again, there's no science to this. You've got to combine your feel for the players and the table with your odds calculations in order to use discounted odds.