True Grit

About True Grit

“The industry has a content problem,” he says. “There are thousands of games being released and too many of them are variations of something that already exists.

“Part of the reason is economics. When games take months and significant money to develop, people naturally become risk-averse. Building on something that already works becomes the safer option.”

For Curwen, tackling the problem therefore means changing the risk-reward equation behind game creation. If creators can develop and test ideas more quickly and at significantly lower cost, an unsuccessful experiment becomes less consequential – and taking a chance on something genuinely different becomes easier to justify.

How to play True Grit

Kendrick sees a warning in the history of betting exchanges. In their early growth phase, there was sufficient retail liquidity for numerous market makers to profit. As that retail pool weakened, the sharper firms increasingly found themselves trading against one another.

His analogy is a poker table at which the weaker participants sustain the game. If those players disappear, the fourth-best professional at the table can suddenly become a loser because only the three strongest remain.

The US addressable market is vastly larger and customer recruitment remains strong. Marantelli says Kalshi increased its number of clients fivefold during the World Cup, while White Swan predicts that NFL prediction markets could generate between $5 billion and $7 billion of liability in a single week.

About True Grit

“For a hundred years this game lived on the corner,” he said in TCS/JOHNHUXLEY’s press release. “Now it’s got a dealer, a pay table and a seat at the table in a real casino. Same dice, new floor.”

Cee-lo—derived from sì wǔ liù (Chinese for “four-five-six”)—is played with three six-sided dice. Popular among Chinese-American players as early as 1893, it was adopted by hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and became a fixture on the street corners of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jadakiss all referenced the game in their music. Kool G Rap called his 1995 album 4,5,6, and its title track included the line “Headcrack, time to get the bread”—the lyric that most likely inspired 50 Cent’s casino adaptation.

But it was Thomas DeCarlo Callaway who gave the game its biggest mainstream exposure, and gesture of love, when he took his stage name, CeeLo Green, directly from it.