Novice needs help

Just started learning Hold Em. The books say if you hold a flush draw on the flop you have nine outs to make the flush--the remaining nine suited cards. In a ten-hand game, however, 20 cards (~38% of the deck) have already been dealt and, on average, five of those should be of the suit. You hold two with three more somewhere on the table. Shouldn't you only have six outs left in the deck /images/graemlins/confused.gif.

[Larimani]

Books say that if you hold a flush draw on the flop you have 9 outs out of 47 unseen cards. 9/47 = 19% chance of getting ur flush on the river.

You are right saying that in average out of 20 cards dealt, 5 are going to be in that suit. However, it is a fallacy that after looking at your cards and seeing 2 of the same suit, there will be in average 3 cards of that same suit dealt to other players. It's called the gambler's fallacy (do a search on wikipedia if you want to find out more about it)

[Larimani]

so after you see your 2 spades card before the flop, you should expect (11x18)/50 =3.96 spades amongst the other players. So there would be on average 7.04 spades left in the deck before the flop. Flop gives you 2 spades so there are now 5.04 spades left in a deck of 27 cards. 5/27= 19% ... same as what the books say...

I hope I didn't make it more complicated than it really is.

If you do not understand this concept you should grab a couple of high-school probability books and study them because you will make many big mistakes in poker otherwise.