I love this story from Monsters and Magical sticks . It startles me all the time -
Las Vegas, Nevada. The lights are bright, a feeling of excitement hangs in the air. A young couple, on their first trip, looking forward to learning and playing blackjack, walk into a beautiful casino. They see aplayer sitting at a blackjack table with thousands of dollars in one hun-dred dollar chips. They watch and listen with fascination. The player is betting three or four hundred dollars a hand, winning and losing. They study the player's method, see his playing style, until they grasp it all,"knowing" with that much money in front of him he has to be an expert.They take their limited funds, sit down, play and lose everything. They then decide there must be something wrong with them if copying an expert leads to such failure. If only they would talk to the casino man-ager, they might learn that the "expert" is really the pizza king ofChicago. He knows everything about pizza and nothing about blackjack.He has enough money to buy large sums of chips and appearances aredeceiving. Even a monkey will get dealt a winning hand from time totime. The couple's mistake was to assume based on appearances.
