[RustyBrooks]

It's quite difficult to put an exact number on the sitation without enumerating the possibilities, for the reason you've noted. The brickness of a card for your opponent is dependent on what you draw, for the middle cards like 9 and T.

As for what cjk73 said, we know what his hand is just for the purposes of the example. I didn't include 6 and 8 in the list of bricks because you won't know that they're bricks - you're better off assuming that any low card that falls didn't pair him unless you have good reason for the contrary.

There's an awful lot of hand-waving in the math here, I admit, but I think it's pretty close/reasonable.

And I'm glad you went through the effort to do the math, appears, it's far better than going by rules of thumb, which may or may not apply to the situation at hand. At the table I do math like this in only the vaguest of terms, I think of 1/3 1/4 1/2 etc and not "57% this" and "33%" that.

Something I am struggling to come up with is a short/fast enough way to discount my outs on later streets, when I am drawing to beat my opponent's current hand, but not his best *possible* hand - so sometimes I will make my hand and lose. It's easy to do with pencil and paper, but I haven't found sort of any good short way to do it in 5 seconds. With holdem you have the same problem but you sort of just get used to discounting outs roughly. But holdem is simpler because you only have to consider which of your outs could be good for your opponent. In stud games your opponent's final card is wholly independent of yours.