The way I understand how miners work is that they see a queue of transactions and contracts, they have a choice of picking a number of those, process them, then pack them into a block, do a PoW, then whoever finishes first wins. (please let me know if this understanding is incorrect)
This raises a question: how many contracts / transactions does a miner pack into the block? How does the miner make that decision?
There seems to be a tradeoff between speed and reward. If I want to make a ton of gas reward, then I put in a ton of transactions & contracts. But then that slows me down, and my likelihood of winning the next block is lower. If I only put a single transaction into the next block, then I can process it faster, but my reward will be low if I do win.
Does each miner then create his own optimized strategy for this? Seems like this is something I can't ever find online.
Thanks!