LAS VEGAS – Jorge Linares senses Devin Haney is in for a rude awakening Saturday night.

The former three-division champion has heard Haney discuss plenty of future fights, so many and so often that Linares believes Haney has no idea how huge of a step up in class he’ll be in their 12-round fight for Haney’s WBC world lightweight title. Handicappers have made Haney (25-0, 15 KOs) at least a 12-1 favorite against Linares (47-5, 29 KOs) in part because the Venezuelan veteran is 35 and lost by knockout or technical knockout five times.

“Look, he’s young and it’s natural,” Linares told BoxingScene.com. “It comes with the youth and the inexperience. He’s overlooking me because he’s already thinking of big fights with Teofimo [Lopez] and Ryan Garcia and the other guys, right? But he made a big mistake. Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew and, in this case, you’re gonna see it Saturday night.”

On paper, Linares appears to be the most dangerous opponent Haney has agreed to fight during his five-year pro career.

Linares is just two years removed from a first-round TKO loss to Mexico’s Pablo Cesar Cano (33-7-1, 23 KOs), who knocked Linares to the canvas three times before Linares’ 140-pound debut was stopped just two minutes and 48 seconds into it. Two fights earlier, though, Linares was beating Vasiliy Lomachenko on one scorecard and was even on another card when Lomachenko landed a perfectly placed body shot that abruptly ended their lightweight title fight in the 10th round at Madison Square Garden.

Whereas Haney has discussed fights against elite-level opponents like Lopez, Lomachenko and Gervonta Davis, Linares has been very competitive with Lomachenko and faced numerous champions on his way to winning world titles in three divisions.

“He’s going on what he’s hearing around him, what he’s reading and hearing,” Linares said. “But on Saturday night, I’m gonna show him the big mistake he made.”

DAZN will stream Haney-Linares as its main event from Mandalay Bay’s Michelob Ultra Arena (8 p.m. EDT; 5 p.m. PDT). Las Vegas’ Haney will make his third defense of a WBC championship he won by stopping Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (13-1, 8 KOs) after the fourth round in September 2019 at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater in New York.

Haney won the WBC’s vacant interim championship by beating Abdullaev. He was elevated to world champion once Lomachenko was designated as the WBC’s franchise champion.

The 22-year-old Haney has gone the distance in each of his title defenses, a pair of 12-round, unanimous-decision defeats of the Dominican Republic’s Alfredo Santiago (13-2, 5 KOs) and Cuba’s Yuriorkis Gamboa (30-4, 18 KOs).

“I respect him,” Linares said. “He’s a young, talented fighter. There’s a lot of controversy and back and forth about how he won the world title – is he the world champion? I see him as a world champion. I have to see him as a world champion. I’m going in there seeing him as a world champion, so that I can do my work and win the title. But let’s not forget how he started and where he started. He started with a lot of his fights in Mexico [10], against a much lower level of competition.”

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.