Calculating the number of outs you have in order to win the hand is extremely important. An out is a card that will improve your hand enough to win the pot. So for example, if you are dealt two hearts in Texas Hold ‘Em and there are two hearts on the board after the flop, you can account for 4 of the 13 hearts in the deck. This leaves you with 9 outs. As you know, a deck has 52 cards in it. After the flop, we now know the identity of 5 cards total (your 2 plus the 3 on the board). This leaves us with 47 possible cards left to deal. If you have 9 outs to hit your flush draw, your odds of winning the hand—assuming you will win with a flush—is 9 out of 47, or about 1 out of five for the next card. If that is not a heart, your odds increase with the river to 9 out of 46, again, slightly worse than 1 out of 5. Add these together and you have about a 38 percent chance of winning the hand.

The thing to keep in mind is that you want to get better pot odds than your actual odds of winning the hand. So in this instance, if there are six other people in the hand with you and you have all put in $100, the pot odds you are receiving will be 100 to 600, or 6:1 odds. This is a higher number than what you are expected to win the hand at. So if you were to play this hand a hundred times, you would lose $100 62 times and win $700 38 times. This equates to a loss of $6,200 and a gain of $26,600. You would be wise to play this hand since over the course of 100 hands in the same situation your total take home will be over $20,000. Knowing your odds at any given moment for both your likelihood of winning the hand and the return in pot odds is a valuable skill. It all starts with being able to correctly identify your outs.