You’ll come across a lot of poker hands where you won’t quite have your hand made yet, but you can feel that the magic card you need will be dealt out.  Instead of just using your gut, you can use a more statistical approach to poker that will help you lose less, and more important, win more. 

“Outs” are the number of cards in the deck that can make your hand.  If you hold AK of spades and 2 more spades flopped on the board, there are 9 cards left in the deck that can help you make that nut flush.  This gives you an implied probability of 35% to make your hand on the turn or on the river.  Implied probability is the percentage of time you will catch one of your outs. 

Implied probability can also be used to determine how often you’ll be dealt certain cards.  It says that you’ll be dealt pocket aces once every 221 hands or any pair once out of every 17 hands.