When you’re playing a game like Texas hold’em or even Omaha being able to calculate your outs will give you a considerable advantage over the other players. Unfortunately, many players don’t know how to calculate their outs, or what outs are. If you want a shot at actually winning a hand, keep reading.

‘Outs’ are basically any cards that haven’t been drawn or seen, that could potentially improve your hand to a winning hand. Keep in mind that this is only relevant for games of poker with more than a single round of betting. Now that you know what outs are; you can learn how and why you should learn to calculate them before you sit down and give away more of your money.

Calculating your outs is a crucial part of a successful poker strategy; if you don’t know how many outs you have left then you shouldn’t keep betting. The good news is that calculating your outs is simple once you know what to do. The first bit of information you should already know, but if you don’t you should know that there are 52 cards in the deck. In that deck there are 4 suits; Spades, Hearts, Clubs and Diamonds.

Let’s begin with a practice hand; you’ve been dealt a Queen and Jack (JQ) and the flop is 2 9 10. To calculate the outs in this hand, first determine what you need to win. You have a JQ and with the 9 and 10 on the board your best bet is an open-ended straight, so you need an 8 or a K to win. There are four 8s left in the deck and four Ks as well, giving you a total of 8 outs.

Now that you know how to calculate the number of outs you have in any given hand, you should understand what your chances of drawing those cards are after the flop and the turn. To do this you take your number of outs (we’ll use 8 outs from the example above) and divide by how many cards are in the deck that you haven’t seen. The number will always be 47 on the turn, or fourth community card, because you’ve seen your 2 cards plus the 3 cards in the flop. To calculate your chances of getting one of those cards on the river, divide by 46 because you’ve just seen the turn. This is what it will look like:

# of outs/ # cards in deck= likelihood of hitting your card(s)
TURN: 8/47=.17 or 17% RIVER: 8/46=.17 OR 17%

There’s a 17 percent chance that you’ll make your straight on the turn or the on the river. Now that you know your chances, you must decide how to act. But you’ll also have to take into account how your opponents bet or don’t bet before making that final decision.

About the Author

Stanley Tucker Columnist of Web Marketing, and specialist Calculating your Outs.