So we’ve all memorized the famous quote as it appears at the start of Rounders. “Listen, here’s the thing,” begins Mike McDermott. “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
The original source for the quote is perhaps even harder to spot than the sucker is. It certainly predated Rounders.
Often cited as an old “poker proverb,” Amarillo Slim Preston — himself the originator of many such sayings — is sometimes pegged as the originator, and he included a version of it in a revised edition of his 1973 book Play Poker to Win published in the mid-2000s: “If you don’t see a sucker at the table, you’re it.