The nature of online Texas Holdem is a very deceiving one. Its apparent simplicity is like a lure attracting thousands upon thousands of new players each day, players who are hardly aware of what’s in store for them once they sit down to a table. The worst thing is that short term play further misleads rookies, fueling their misconceptions via the high variance and the prevalence of the luck factor. All that summed up, makes it extremely difficult for a beginner to make heads and tails of what this game is really supposed to be about. Under the simple crust there hides a system of an almost infinite intricacy, which runs however on a few fairly simple principles like mathematical expectation and correct play. Correct play is about the existence of a correct way to play every poker hand. If you managed to play every hand as if you saw your opponents’ pocket cards, you’d achieve perfection, which is exactly what hardened poker professionals attempt to do hand after hand. Mathematical expectation is a tad more complicated. Every bet that one makes (be that in poker or any other casino game) carries an expected value. On a coin-flip, and with equal amounts of wagers involved, the expected value is 0, because on average you’d always win one out of every two flips. What you’d win on that, you’d lose on the next one and so forth and so on. If one of the participants were to lay $2 against the other guy’s $1 though, this would all change. That would immediately shift the mathematical expectation to 50 cents/bet in favor of the guy placing the $1. With 50-50 odds on a coin-flip, the guy with the $2 bet would win $1 on the first bet, and lose $2 on the second. That is a net loss of $1, which would be net win for the other guy. $1/2bets = 50 cents. This is the mathematical expectation on a bet like this one. +$0.5 for the $1 wager, and -0.5 for the $2 wager. Poker bets are a lot like the above presented example, only they’re much more intricate. While the example shows that mathematic expectation is only influenced by the wager-amounts on both sides of the bet, the eventual money in the pot, and the odds on the bet itself, in poker this gets far more complicated. The bets themselves are much more complex in poker, with the money flowing into the pot from many different directions, and the odds on the different hands going up against each-other are much more complicated, too. The most important thing you need to know about EV (expected value) is that it’s the fundamental driving force behind long-term winning poker. Whenever you play a hand on positive EV, you always win a little (never mind if you’re actually outdrawn and lose), and whenever you play on negative EV you lose a little (even if you actually win on a hand). That said, it’s obvious that you may only play EV+ situations. The above named reasons as well as the fact that online poker is very fast and the timer’s ticking prevents you from stringing even a couple of relevant thoughts together, make it very difficult to calculate the EV for any given situation you’re in. In time, you can grow to accurately estimate it, but why bother? There are poker tools out there, like MagicHoldem, which calculate the expected value in a few tenths of a second thus giving you a clear indication what you have to do, every step of the way. The fact that it also offers real time advice regarding the potential risks to your hand and other such subtleties comes as an added benefit. A player though, who knows the nature of the game, can turn MagicHoldem’s pot odds calculator into a handsome profit alone.