I've heard it said a hundred times: "Professional gamblers should never take the worst of it." Those words always thunder through my head like a tornado roaring closer and closer. They're terrifying to hear, because not only are they untrue, they signal impending doom for any poker bankroll.

Most of the money I've ever earned as a gambler has come from my willingness to take the worst of it. Every successful big-limit gambler I know can be wagered out of small sums of money again and again. And he's happy to be the victim.

If my words sound strange to you, listen closely. I'm about to share one of the biggest secrets to my success. Most average poker players will enter into games hoping to win, but will often find themselves outmatched. In their minds, though, it isn't that they're being outmaneuvered or outplayed. It's that luck has turned against them. And that illusion keeps them pumping more and more chips into the pots, hoping fate will be kinder, hoping they'll get back to even. And then win.

More likely, their nightmare will consume them and things will get worse. And worse. They'll leave the table like whipped puppies who've unwisely done battle with the big dogs, hobbling off with tails tucked between their legs, broke and battered. I've seen it again and again.

Exploring

Now, you're probably thinking that just proves the wisdom of the advice never to take the worst of it. It doesn't. It proves only that average players aren't looking at poker sessions as short exploratory ventures, designed to determine whether they have the best of it. Can you imagine a Texas oilman, in the heydays of oil exploration a few decades ago, drilling to see what's down there and, when finding nothing, drilling deeper and deeper, eating up more and more money until he went broke. It didn't work that way with successful oilmen. They drilled to find out. When it turned out to be a dry drill, they accepted that loss and used their capital to explore elsewhere. That way, they only needed to strike oil once in a while to get very rich. Poker's like that.