🙅 A stubborn person 🃏 Secret cheating

holdout

1 8.6

Keeping an extra card secretly to use later in a game

noun
/ˈhoʊldaʊt/

Archaic

: truco para ocultar cartas

During the poker game, he used a holdout to keep a winning hand hidden from the other players.

Examples

The gambler's clever use of a holdout allowed him to turn the odds in his favor without anyone noticing.
Players often watch for any signs of a holdout when someone is unusually secretive about their cards.
I figure this guy went for that holdout piece, ankle holster, right?

Heat (1995)
The sweet-faced guy has been playing with a metal sleeve holdout—a bunch of cards are held in place, hidden by the shirt.

Fiction book (1994)
If a guy's clothes look funny, he may be cheating with a holdout. Watch for that—if someone asks for a rule clarification before he bets, run and hide; he knows the rules and is trying to sucker you.

Fiction book (1994)

Synonyms

an ace up someone's sleeve

vsholdout

Informal

3 5.8

A secret advantage someone keeps to use when needed

is a specific cheating act of secretly hiding cards to use later

Antonyms

disclosure

209 4.1

Making secret or new information known to others

Surface Forms

holdout singular

holdouts plural

Morphology

holdout = hold (semi-transparent) = out + hold

The idea of holding cards back is suggestive, but the gambling-specific cheating sense is more specialized than a direct compositional reading. [Postprocessing: moved 'out' from base_words to prefix]

Etymology

Holdout can also mean a secret trick in card games and comes from the idea of hold ('to keep') + out ('away'), meaning to secretly save a card for later. That's why a gambling holdout is about keeping extra cards to use for a personal, unfair advantage.