“In the beginning, everything was even money.”
Poker author Mike Caro is the one who came up with that one. It’s a great opener for a strategy article, alluding as it does to another famous opening line.
Caro uses that starting point to explain why it is important for gamblers — and poker players — to learn odds and probabilities. He takes the example of a child learning about the world, not yet knowing the difference between various things or the meanings of words. “Every single thing you heard would be either true or false,” writes Caro, but you hadn’t yet learned how to know the difference.