// poker odds · drawing: turn and river

Flush draw odds

What are the odds of hitting a flush draw? The short answer is below, and under it the working: the formula with the numbers put in, and the count from dealing every possible card.

9 outs, turn or river34.97%378 / 1,081
as a frequency1 in 2.86on average
odds against1.86 to 1misses to hits
on the turn alone19.15%9 / 47
Example: A♥K♥ on Q♥7♥2♣9 outs · 47 unseen cards · 1,081 turn-and-river runouts

Why it is 9 outs

Thirteen cards of each suit; you hold two and the flop shows two, so nine remain unseen. Any of them completes the flush. On this board the nine are also the only cards that help, which makes it a clean count.

The working

On the flop you have seen five cards, so 47 are unseen. They come off in pairs, turn and river, and there are C(47, 2) = 1,081 ways for that to happen. You miss only when both cards are among the 38 that do not help:

P(miss)  = C(38, 2) / C(47, 2) = 703 / 1,081 = 65.03%
P(hit)   = 1 − 65.03% = 34.97%   (1.86 to 1 against)
Turn     = 9 / 47 = 19.15%
River    = 9 / 46 = 19.57%   (if the turn missed)

Then the engine dealt every one of the 1,081 runouts to the example hand and counted how many finish with a flush or better: 378 / 1,081 = 34.97%. The same count as the formula, runout for runout, so on this board nothing else gets you there.

Is it a call?

Calling a bet of B into a pot of 1 risks B to win 1 + B, so you need B ÷ (1 + 2B) of the final pot. The table compares that with the draw's chance of arriving. “All-in now” means you see both cards for one price; “one card only” means there will be another bet on the turn, and then the draw has one card at a time. Where one card is not enough, the right-hand column says how much extra you must win on the hands where it hits (implied odds) to make the call break even.

Whether the draw has the price to call
Bet facedEquity neededAll-in now (35.0%)One card only (19.1%)
⅓ pot20.0%CallFold, or win 0.07× pot more when it hits
½ pot25.0%CallFold, or win 0.61× pot more when it hits
⅔ pot28.6%CallFold, or win 1.15× pot more when it hits
Pot33.3%CallFold, or win 2.22× pot more when it hits
1.5× pot37.5%FoldFold, or win 3.83× pot more when it hits

This assumes every out wins and nothing else does: if your opponent can make a better hand on the same card, those outs are dirty and the real equity is lower. The spot calculator prices it against a whole range instead of a single hand.

Backdoor flush draws

With one card of your suit on the flop you need both the turn and the river: C(10, 2) = 45 of the 1,081 runouts, 4.16% (23.0 to 1 against). Worth about one and a half outs, not nothing. To flop the draw in the first place a suited hand needs two of its suit, which happens 10.9% of the time.

Hitting is half of it; the other half is the price. The pot odds pages show which draws can call a third-pot, half-pot or pot-sized bet, and what each one must win later when it cannot.

Pot odds by bet size →

More drawing: turn and river

Other odds

// how these numbers were computed
  • Counted, not quoted. tools/build-odds.mjs deals every possible flop, turn, river or starting hand and counts. Where a closed-form formula exists, the build refuses to publish unless the count matches it exactly.
  • Made hands come from the engine. Whether cards make a straight, a flush or a full house is decided by the same Rust/WebAssembly evaluator the trainer runs, not by hand-written rules.
  • Odds are not equity. Hitting your hand is not winning the pot. For that, the matchup pages deal every board against a specific hand and the spot calculator works against a range.
  • Raw data: odds.json.