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shiny - 1/8192
As a child I loved Pokemon. By 12 I was running an online bazaar for rare specimens.
When I discovered Pokemon as a child I discovered a whole new world. So much to see! Hundreds of Pokemon to find in a virtual world full of mysteries - it was as much of an open world game as it could get back then. One day I encountered a Ponyta that was snow white with a flaming blue mane instead of the regular egg-white fur and the orange-red flaming mane. I didn't know it but it was a shiny - a rare color variant with a chance of 1/8192 to appear - , I though it was a bug and caught it.
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shiny - 1/8192
Back then the internet did not have an immediate answer for everything and I could not find any record of a flaming blue Ponyta on any of the (german) websites I knew. Several hours of research later I learned that what it was: a shiny. Not too long afterI encountered a shiny Gastly, and from there on I had the shiny hunting fever. Not all went well - I knocked out a shiny Parasect and fled from a shiny Starly before realizing what it was...
shiny Gastly
Right about then online trading became a thing. New games could be connected to the wifi and you could trade with people from all over the world. So I went online and realized that many people had one version of the Game, which locked some version exclusives for them. Everyone was aiming to fill their Pokedex (a Library of Pokemon you have), and for that they needed also the version exclusives of the other versions. I realized that and starting trading those for other rare Pokemon up to shinies. After +60 hours of online trading I had amassed over 60 shinies and dozens of other rarities. Trades became increasingly faster but they were not targeted enough - often I was offered similar specimens I already had. This led me onto Pokefans.net - back then the biggest german speaking online forum online - where I opened an online bazaar with my inventory, allowing me to show what I have and precissely declare what I am looking for. Soon after I added a cloning service - common practice at the time - keeping a clone as payment, further expanding my inventory. In parallel I wa learning about PRNG manipulation: the Games determine which Pokemon you encounter in a specific way. At each startup a Seed is generated which is used to determine what random numbers are being generated to simulate seemingly random events ingame. The thing is they are not really random, just pseudo random. If you know the algorithm, the seed and some other variables, you can predict these random events including the shiny encounters. I spent hours digging into and understandingthe linear congruential generator the game used as Random Number Generator (RNG). When I learned english I discovered that there was an online tool that already allowed for such predictions - the PRNG Simulator by Smogon (his online alias). My collection was growing daily via trading, cloning, and RNG manipulation.
shiny Starly
Soon after I found out that a some of the people I knew had friends and friends of friends in Japan and the US - and I started trading with them. Back then Event Pokemon often were distributed locally, and it would take months before the same event pokemon that had already been released in Japan or the US would come to europe. But due to my connections to Japan and the US I had already been trading them for months by the time the events made it to europe. The next hurdle was that some of the events you had to go to physical stores for and some people were nowhere near any of those. When GameStop and Softridge distributed event codes you could use ingame on physical paper cards, I spent hours going around every eligible store collecting as many as I could over the course of weeks. Then I would trade those codes online via chat rooms with people who couldn't access them, for rarer Pokémon.
Within a year I had built one of the biggest marketplaces on the entire platform - hundreds of shinies, event Pokémon, and EV/IV-optimized Pokémon (effort values and individual values - hidden stats that govern competitive strength). Some of these went to actual championship players.
After thousands of trades and becoming one of the top 5 markets on the platform, I decided to shut it down. Demand had become unmanageable, I had almost every rare Pokémon one could wish for, and I wanted to focus on high school and physics.
Till this day I still revisit the old games every once in a while.