Most poker players will tell you that the game involves skill. You have to be able to calculate odds, and you must possess the all-important ability to read your opponent.

But Darvin Moon keeps talking about luck.

Despite being the overall chip leader in this year's World Series of Poker, Mr. Moon, 45, a logger from the tiny town of Oakland, Md., insists he's simply been blessed with good fortune.

"I'm not all that good," he insists in a slow drawl that just might make you let your guard down. "I'm just lucky and got the good cards. And when I got the best cards, somebody always seemed to have the cards just a little bit worse than I had, and I won big pots."

Big pots have taken him from the Wheeling Island Casino poker room to the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, Nev., where Mr. Moon will sit down as a member of the "November Nine" playing for poker's biggest prize: $8.5 million and the fabled bracelet that goes to the winner.

Mr. Moon, who lives with his wife, Wendy, in a rural stretch of Maryland's panhandle, started playing Texas Holdem three or four years ago with some friends.

"We used to play softball together on the little local softball team here, and we got too fat and old to play softball anymore, so we decided to find something else to do," he says. "So we started playing poker."

The group set up benefit tournaments, played in local fire halls and social clubs, where everyone paid $30 to play. Ten dollars from each player would be donated to some needy family or cause.

He has never played poker on the Internet, and he hasn't read any of the "how-to" books that so many players write.

"I play against real people and I've gotten where I can read people," he says. "I think that helps me a lot. I've made a couple of good reads."

Eventually, Mr. Moon found his way to Wheeling, where he started playing in the WSOP satellite tournaments. Winners were staked to a seat in Las Vegas, valued at $10,000.

Mr. Moon came in third once, ninth another time. The other three trips weren't as successful. But in March, he finished first, putting him in the field of 6,494 players facing off in Las Vegas during the first two weeks of July.

"It went good the whole way," he says. "I've never had to put all my chips into any one pot yet. Anytime somebody else went all-in, I had them covered.

"I doubled my stack every day, except for the days when I tripled or quadrupled it."

One hand in particular put him over the top. He was going head-to-head with Billy Kopp, who was in 11th place at the time.

"He could have coasted into the top nine," Mr. Moon says. "But he raised me $23 million, and I knew 100 percent that I had him. When he made his all-in move, my heart about leaped out of my chest. I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath before I said, 'I call,' because I knew there was no way he had me beat."

Mr. Moon had the queen and jack of diamonds in his hand, and the cards on the table included a king, nine and six of diamonds, giving him a flush. The only way Mr. Kopp could beat him was if he also had two diamonds and one of them was the ace.

"I got a read on him about three or four hands earlier," Mr. Moon says. "I saw the expression on his face, and I knew he didn't have the ace."

When he sits at the table for the WSOP in November, Mr. Moon will have almost 59 million chips, nearly 24 million than the next-highest player. Poker experts say he could not play a hand for the first three or four hours of the championship and just let the other players knock each other out before getting serious himself.

"That's probably what will happen," he says. "The only hands I'm going to play is when I have quality hands. I've been fortunate enough that that strategy has worked for me. I don't try to buy hands, because that's giving chips away."

Mr. Moon was approached by several sponsors as he rolled into the chip lead, but he has rebuffed them all.

"I'm not interested," he says. "If you sign, then they want you to represent them for the next year. I'm my own person. I'm not interested in anybody telling me what I gotta do and when I gotta do it. Money don't mean nothing. Freedom is everything."

So while the other players wear caps and shirts touting their sponsors, Mr. Moon will be looking at his cards from under his lucky New Orleans Saints cap -- without sunglasses.

Still, it isn't as if the experience hasn't affected him.

"It's a life-changing thing that's happened here," he says. "I mean, I'm still going to be the same person, but you gotta live a little different and you gotta watch what you do."

He says he is confident he is going to win in November.

"If you don't have confidence, there's no sense in playing," he says.

And even if he finishes ninth, he is assured of taking home $1.26 million.

"But when I leave Las Vegas in November, the poker world ain't going to see no more of me, unless they come to Oakland, Md., and play in one of our little benefit tournaments," he says. "Until next year. I would return to the World Series of Poker. I feel I should support that, out of respect for what they've done for me. But I go back on my terms, not somebody else's."