Owens: I took you off the street. Taught you my trade. I taught you my passion. Three generations of skills. And in spite of all my earnest efforts, in spite of all my hard work, you turned into a good person.
Nicky: There's two kinds of people in this world. There's hammers and there's nails. You decide which one you want to be.
Nicky: Here's the thing about lying. Here's the problem: it fucks up all your options. Paints you into a corner.
Owens: What the fuck you talking about? You out of your mind?
Nicky: And then you're forced to do some really dumb shit.
Owens: You wanna die?
Nicky: Well, if I die, I die telling the truth. And if I lie, I'm gonna lie like normal people lie.
Owens: Love'll get you killed in this racket. No place for that shit here. No happiness with that. You know how they say there's honor among thieves? Well, you're no thief, Mellow. You made your choice.
Nicky: It's about distraction. It's about focus. The brain is slow and it can't multitask. Tap him here, take from there.
Nicky: You get their focus, you can take whatever you want.
Nicky: I can convince anyone of anything. I once convinced a man that an empty warehouse was the federal reserve, so I'm good.
Nicky: I wish you the best of luck.
Garriga: With friends like you, who needs luck?
Answer: Absolutely. There are many people (especially people who work on high commissions and con men) who are well practiced in subtle cues with body language. The elaborate process they went through in the movie greatly increased the chances he would make such a pick, but there was no guarantee. However, it was constructed with personal knowledge of the target. Even more strange was the fact that a string of some of his reasonable bets went bad (the missed extra point, the pick of the card, etc). Had they all not gone bad, it would have disrupted his faked desperation to the multi-million dollar bet.