If you're like me you've seen these advertisements everywhere.
Come to our Casino where EVERYONE makes money!!!!1
Yeah, except not.
Obviously the entire business model that revolves around casinos relies on exactly the opposite. Most clients must lose a lot of money on average to keep the casino afloat. Casinos have a lot of overhead costs (wages, property tax, tech, upkeep, etc).
I have never understood the appeal of slot machines. They are the most boring money-sucking vampires I have ever seen. I have never spent a single dollar on a slot-machine... ever. And yet every time I go into a casino I come to the gross realization that they are the most popular and profitable attraction by a wide margin.
At least when they had the lever on the side that you could pull it: felt like you were doing something. Now you just hit a button and it takes your money. So much fun! I seriously don't get it.
At least a game like Craps makes sense. It's a social game. You get to roll dice. There are dozens of different bets you can make (including "don't pass" which is a total troll bet). Even roulette makes sense because it's super simple and your odds of winning on red/black are almost 50%. Meanwhile on a slot machine your odds are whatever they choose them to be (within the bounds of the law).
Texas Holdem is my game.
Much like @theycallmedan, I also have the skills be a poker pro. Back in olden days before Americans were banned from Full Tilt (Black Friday) I was easily able to play four tables at once $1 No Limit games making $5 an hour at each table.
Yeah that's only $20 an hour, but that wage was certainly better than my other options. One of the big problems I had trying to scale up my poker operation was that I would go on tilt and have a very hard time dealing with unlucky streaks. The prospect of losing hundreds of dollars after working an eight hour day was terrifying and I never had a big enough bankroll to be fully confident in my abilities.
The crypto equivalent to this would be HODLing during crashes. This is something that many of my readers will identify with. Let me tell you: it's a helluva lot easier to HODL during a crypto crash than it is to lose huge poker pots with amazing hands and keep playing well. When you HODL there's no thinking involved: that's why it's so easy and such a good strategy.
HODL!
In fact, hodling is such a good strategy that it spells out the obvious: crypto is a casino where everybody wins. The first of its kind. It is a miracle in many respects (especially POW consensus that turns physical energy into digital gold).
Never before has such an amazing gambling asset been so profitable for so many citizens. The strategy becomes simple when there is no house to exploit us: just hold; you ARE the house. It's an automatic victory with zero skill required: unlike every other professional gambling outlet in existence where only the top 1%-10% of players will make money on average.
Not only is crypto itself one of the best gambles of all time: but it's also going to revolutionize all other forms of gambling in existence. I've already detailed one of the projects I have in mind: Marbles on Stream.
Marbles on Stream is the perfect gambling game to be paired with Bitcoin. It requires zero skill and is 100% gambling. However, because it's a Twitch game at the moment no actual gambling occurs. Can you imagine when people are winning thousands of dollars on something think this? Instant mainstream adoption.
If I'm being honest I'm almost afraid to build products like this on Hive so early in the game. Imagine if our network started eating the lunch of every gambling establishment. Imagine lotteries being usurped and all that money flowing from the state to crypto. Imagine decentralized poker games popping up that have zero rake that makes it ten times easier to make money on average and is nearly impossible to regulate.
Given this future our network would almost certainly come under extreme scrutiny by the regulators, and if I'm being honest I don't think Hive is strong enough to risk its life on that particular gamble (yet). It may be better to take a wait-and-see attitude and allow other networks to come under fire first.
Regardless, the prospect of a decentralized Texas Holdem game connected to crypto cannot be overstated. Texas Holdem is like Chess. Would you ever pay money to play Chess? NO! OF COURSE NOT! So why would anyone every pay money to play poker? It's the exact same concept.
The only thing different about poker is that chess doesn't have any money involved. Regulators see thousands of dollars exchanging hands and they freak out and impose their draconian will. Providing centralized poker services then become very risky and the operators of these sites have to charge obscene fees to make it worth it.
The rake
When you go to a brick-and-mortar cardroom these days you might pay up to $5 in drop every hand. Every hand the winner of a pot pays $5 to the cardroom. Think about that for a second: after 100 hands $500 will disappear off the table. This number becomes obscene over time and makes it impossible to win unless you play medium to high stakes games. In Vegas (haven't been for 10 years) they might give you a discount of 10% up to a $3 cap. That's the absolute best case scenario for a physical card room.
Meanwhile, with online poker, last I checked they still charge a 5% rake up to a $3 cap. However, online games come with their own pros and cons. You can play more tables but playing more tables can split your attention and make you play poorly. You also might be playing against bots that are much more difficult to beat than an average player. Also anyone worth their salt is using a database to analyze playing patterns, and you can even pay 3rd party sites for this information because bots are recording every hand and every player.
There's also the issue of cheating. Many online players make claims that cheating occurs, and some of these claims are actually credible. One person did a study against the hand AQ vs AK on a particular site, and AQ won so many times that it was actually statistically impossible for this to happen without the game being rigged or bugged.
With crypto, all of these problems get thrown directly out the window. The games are impossible to regulate. Competition brings the rake down to zero. Zero rake makes it even harder to regulate because if no centralized authority is making a profit that it's legally not even gambling by definition. These would instead be digital "home-games" which are 100% legal if no rake is being taken.
On top of that, reputations are built. Imagine this service on Hive. You wouldn't play against random bots: you'd play against people you knew and interacted with all the time. Random accounts would be excluded from exclusive tables.
Even more importantly: cheating is impossible.
Literally impossible. Whereas before we had to trust the cardroom to provide the random data for shuffling the deck, with crypto everyone provides a fragment of the algorithm in a decentralized way. The only way to cheat would be to hack every single player's private key used for RNG (not going to happen).
This is something that many in the cryptosphere don't understand the value of yet: cheating and counterfeiting are IMPOSSIBLE. When applied to a competitive gambling game like Texas Holdem, that's absolutely insane. As soon as these problems are solved and decentralized homegames start booting up there's going to be a massive resurgence due to all these factors.
At least.
I fully believe that I will be able to make at least $100/hour on average gambling on the blockchain in under 10 years. Hell, I'm already making several multiples more than that farming CUB in addition to my blogging/curation rewards. It's already a done deal.
THE CRUX
RNG (Random Number Generation) is the crux of all these developments. Unhackable random numbers will fuel every single gaming dapp into the future. This issue is being solved very slowly, but as soon as a single dev team comes up with a good solution it will be copied and streamlined a thousand times over. Soon™
Conclusion
You can't see the forest from the trees. While everyone asks wen and complains about Tesla selling 10% of their Bitcoin stack, all I can think about is how lucky we are to be here this early. Crypto is the ultimate casino: And we are all guaranteed winners.
100% of all users that bought BTC before 2021 are in the extreme green, but all they can say is moar moar moar. The greed is infinite and embarrassing to be sure. But that's why we had to build these systems in the first place so I guess it makes sense. Keep on keepin on and hodl strong.
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