Scott Montgomery made a final table in the first live tournament he ever played. And, no, it wasn't the WSOP Main Event. That tourney came a couple of months later.

It was February 2008 and Montgomery had been playing poker for several years already. Though primarily an online player, he had decided to test his skills in the live arena, and chose the WPT L.A. Poker Classic Championship as his jump-off point.

Needless to say, it was a very smart decision. His fifth-place finish - at a final table that included Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey and Nam Le - netted him nearly $300k and put him on the poker map.

In the months following, he went on to win an addition $75k by running deep in several other prestigious live events, including three World Series of Poker tournaments (the $10k World Championship Heads-Up NLHE event among them) and the Bellagio Cup IV.

In his mid-20s at the time, it's safe to say Scott was having a good run of it. But the best was yet to come.

Given his good luck, Scott made the fateful decision to fork over another $10k for the WSOP 2008 Main Event, where he ran deep again - like, final-table, November Nine deep.

So how does a pro player relatively new to live tournaments consistently make the top 30 in some of poker's biggest events? It's all about strategy and attitude, apparently.

"In smaller tournaments you just can never bluff people off hands, which is how I make my money," he confessed to PokerListings.com. "And in these tournaments, well, I bluff people off of their hands all the time."

"Nobody wants to risk their whole tournament - nobody but me, because I don't care. I never care," he explained.

"Because I know that to win that's the attitude you've got to have. So I tell myself not to care and that's what I do."

A bit kamikaze? For sure. But obviously it's working for him.