Do you have any other interesting stories or references to that time of your life?
ah fuckit. SO yeah, I lived outside the US and ran a bitcoin casino for some years for non-US players, which was blocked to US IP ranges and required IDs to eliminate US customers (even though Bitcoin gambling still wasn't officially illegal at the time). My general idea was to make a casino for smart people who liked puzzles, so to that end I built games that would let people have an even-money chance if they played the game perfectly.
The coolest thing that came out of this was one of my players went on to build an escape room in the Netherlands that used one of my games as a puzzle to solve to get out of the room. Here's some stuff from that casino (it was active from about 2010 to 2013).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJV40hu9J38 https://youtu.be/rkRfSAtCYAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD4GqCAAsmo
My advice to anyone is not to get into that industry, even though you can make any game you want and people love the games and the business model sounds way better on paper than selling your games through an app store... the civilized world has ganged up to make sure you won't succeed, or that if you do you'll either kick all your money back through licensing schemes or else be arrested. It's basically too good to be true and too profitable. You can't make money at it unless you're in the club.
A bit like how lottery tickets costing $1 will make you win $1, $2 etc. prizes so you buy another ticket and so increase the revenue (a percentage of which is profit), the same for the house. 2 losers winning money off each other all night means they both lose and gave lots of money to the house. A winner taking the 2 losers money in a fell swoop means a lot less money for the house.
To exemplify the two extremes, assuming 10% rake: Player A has $10, and loses $1 every hand: after 10 hands, he's broke and $1 went to the casino. Player B and Player C are equally skilled and equally lucky. They keep playing $1 pots, trading back and forth. After twenty hands, both have still have $9 while the casino already earned $2. They could essentially keep going until they have given all their money to the casino.
[edit] As an individual player, obviously, whether IRL casino or online your goal is to outpace the rake. You factor the rake into your expected losses and find a casino with a low rake (ours was actually 3%) and try to get away as a winner. But of course as a casino owner I love grinders and they're who you want day in and day out.
That said: If you're making a book (for sportsbetting) then yes, you are trying to balance the difference rather than predict a winner. That's a totally different thing from running a casino.
I got a few good players to agree to let me take all their data and make poker clones of them. What was really funny was watching them get baffled and often beaten in heads-up play against their doppelgangers. The bot never had more information about the game than any other player. But its betting style varied wildly depending on who it was based on.
As a side, this also helped me build a real-time system to monitor potential collusion based on betting patterns that deviated from a player's normal behavior at times when they were sitting at the same table as someone else whose patterns deviated in their presence.