The scariest person at a poker table full of veterans is not the man in the cowboy hat, the guy wearing sunglasses at night, or the guy in the tuxedo who’s casually stirring a martini with one hand and riffling through his chips with the other. The scariest person is the one who doesn’t know the rules of poker as well as the others.
If you’ve read all the books about poker, watched all the online tutorials, and heeded all the expert advice, and then you sit down to play poker with the pros—you’re going to get wrecked.
Because the pros know the rules and conventional actions and reactions better than you ever will, and they know what you’re going to do. When you follow their rules and play their game, the odds are stacked as high as a mountain.
But if you sit down at that poker table blissfully unaware of the rules, you’re going to terrify those veterans. They can’t read you. They can’t calculate your actions. You’re bringing something new to the table, and they don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s crazy, maybe it’s dangerous, or maybe it’s the future.
