But they are playing games with OTHER people's money (aside from the payoff for them)
You are playing with YOUR money.
You are playing with YOUR money.
The alpha dynamics of a liquidity related sell-off are heavily tilted towards folks with locked up capital. Why do you think every manager and their mother has raised a distressed fund?[1]
You can have access to that return profile simply by having some capital ready to deploy as an individual, for the reasons I described above. This can add massive alpha.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/record-nu...