A casual question that most poker players have asked at least once is, “Is there any secret that shows you how to win in Texas Hold ‘Em?” and my answer would be, no, there isn’t. But a huge help would be evaluating your hand strength as soon as possible. For some, calculating the odds of winning sounds very complicated but it really isn’t.

Before going any further, we should clear up a few things. Firstly, you should know that even if you compute your odds and they say you’re good to go, it does not necessarily mean that you’re going to win. It’s what you do after that determines if you will win or not.

Having that in mind, you should evaluate your hand and if it turns out to be weak, you ought to bluff others into folding. On the contrary, if you have a strong hand, you should appear weak and trick others into betting large amounts of money.

You should firstly understand what outs are all about. The out cards in poker are all those which have not been drawn yet and if they do, they will improve a player’s hand. In other words, they are cards which will help a player win by creating a strong hand.

Counting the outs is a method proven to help poker players. In order to count, a player should be very attentive and alert to see all the cards that have been drawn. The more outs there are on the deck, the better are the chances of winning the game. Counting is easily done but the player has to be very visual to do it correctly.

Now let’s take a look at the odds of an out card being drawn. Let’s imagine there is only one out on the deck and one card is going to be drawn. The odds for the out card to be drawn are 2%. Not so good, huh? If there are going to be two cards drawn, the odds in that case would be 4%. But if there are 15 outs and two cards will be drawn, the odds will be ~54%. That’s better.

There is a method of calculating the odds for the out card to show up. If there are five outs and one card will be drawn, you have to multiply the number of outs (in this case five) with two and you will get the odds (~10%). If there are going to be two cards drawn, you have to multiply the number of outs with four (in this case, five times four = 20%). These calculations can be quite helpful and are the best way to help you decide whether you should bet or withdraw.