Sklansky attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for a year before leaving to become a professional gambler. He briefly took on a job as an actuary before embarking into poker. While on the job, he discovered a faster way to do some of the calculations and took that discovery to his boss. The boss told him he could go ahead and do it that way if he wanted but wouldn't pass on the information to the other workers. "In other words, I knew something no one else knew, but I got no recognition for it," Sklansky is quoted as saying in Al Alvarez's 1983 work "The Biggest Game in Town." "In poker, if you're better than anyone else, you make immediate money. If there's something I know about the game that the other person doesn't, and if he's not willing to learn or can't understand, then I take his money."