Tangentially: reading about the history of gambling theory (the “unfinished game” problem, etc.) is pretty interesting.
Imagine how weird it was when people basically didn’t understand expected value at all! Did casinos even know what they were doing, or did they somewhat routinely fail after picking the wrong game design? Did they only settle on profitable designs by accident? Are blackjack, roulette, and other very old games still with us because they happened not to bankrupt casinos that ran them, and were only later analyzed with tools capable of identifying whether the house had the edge?
ChristianKI is right—I was speculating that people would stop retiring. Updated my post to make that clearer.