Nuts

The best possible hand on a given board

Definition

The 'nuts' refers to the best possible hand given the visible community cards (the board). Having the nuts means you can't lose the hand — you can only hope to extract maximum value from your opponent. The nuts change on every street based on the new community cards. On an A♦K♦7♦ board, the nuts is the queen-high flush: since A♦ and K♦ are already on the board, the best flush belongs to the player holding Q♦ (along with another diamond). If the board becomes A♦K♦Q♦J♦, the nuts becomes the royal flush, held by any player with the T♦. The concept of the nuts is central to range construction: value ranges on big sizings are often built around the nuts and near-nuts. Identifying who has the nut advantage on a given board (the player whose range contains more nutted hands) is a key skill of GTO analysis.