Partial Outs

[Vulpine]

My question regards the discussion of partial outs on pages 100 and 101 of “Small Stakes Hold’em.” The example that I'm concerned about involves Qs Js with a widow of 9s 8h 4h 2c. The analysis indicates that with partial outs the hand is worth 7 outs instead of the usual 4 outs. I believe this should be true no matter how many opponents there are or what they hold. However, I determined through enumeration with Poki’s showdown calculator that if this hand were played heads up against 9h 9c (the nuts on the turn or the "worst case scenario"), the odds against it becoming the winning hand would be about 10 to 1. This translates to only slightly more than the four outs that would be estimated without partial outs suggesting that the effect of partial outs may have been over estimated. Is my analysis correct?

[DMBFan23]

your assessment of that hand's strength vs 99 is accurate, Hero has only 4 outs in that case.

However, the concept of partial outs is based on the fact that you don't know your opponent's holding, so sometimes hitting a Q is good (vs. AK), sometimes you hit a Q and lose (like against 99). so theoretically you could average your outs versus each possible hand and come up with your "expected outs" or something like that. but since you can't do that on the fly, assume all outs are good and then partially discount some given the action, your opponent, etc as described in SSH.

[Girazze]

Seems to me that calculating partial outs would give a false sense of security. In this case, are we counting any 10, J or Q as a possible winner? This would give us 10 outs. But then we say to ourselves "but they might now win even if I get one" so we decrease that number a bit? Or are we saying that based on the opponents reactions, the partial outs can become stronger or weaker?