>It was about scamming anybody he could, just because
>he thought that's all that there was to life.

I don't think this has ever been shown in the show. I don't see him as ever scamming "anybody he could".

Jimmy has a nose for the asshole in the room. The guys we see Slippin' Jimmy go after- the bar guys- are just that, and a major part of his scheming is luring them in with their asshole tendencies, showing that they're more than happy to con *him*.

His marks consistently share this trait, and he simply uses that against them. Shit, he did the exact thing with Chuck.

I don't see even a slight case for him scamming anybody he could.

Frankly, he's a lot more like Dexter in this regard.

He's an alpha wolf among wolves, a particular brand of predator who doesn't necessarily hunt other predators- I'm using that term loosely-, but one who makes a point of weeding out those predators when he sees them.

IMO that's the greater point of the man at the cash register. Jimmy isn't just a kill-or-be-killed kind of guy. It can be argued that each of his marks is some form of that man, and that's who Jimmy is out to get. But definitely not anyone.

>And eventually he wanted to prove -- most of all to himself --
>that Chuck's great success in life was also fundamentally
>about finding the cracks in the system. So Jimmy wanted to
>show that he could scam his way to a legal career.

He didn't though. He went to a real school and practiced real law. He exploits those same cracks as chuck, albeit through less conventional method, but I don't see him as "scamming his way to a legal career" by any stretch. I don't think that's born out in his story. He definitely uses those scamming abilities to a degree- see the shit with Lalo's "family" in court, or the fake witness in court.

So while he uses plenty of smoke & mirrors along the way, I think it's an unfair characterization that he thought he could scam his way to a legal career.

And he
>basically did, but as we saw, just becoming a lawyer doesn't
>make him Charles McGill, and we all saw how that turned out.

He's arguably Chuck's peer, intellectually. Frankly, it's likely that we'd see a much different Jimmy right today, were Chuck not undermining him every step of the way, literally starting the moment Jimmy showed him the law degree. But that constant reminder of what he was previously, only served to push him toward a seedier path.