> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.
Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.
>Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.
She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!
To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.
To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.
This seems instructive for considering when a difference in degree makes for a difference in kind. Let's call this "whale potential": the amount of money that a power user can naturally funnel into a casino over a single visit is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of money that a power user can funnel into a ski resort over a single visit. For a casino, the act of a customer losing money is not merely a side effect of the activity, it is the primary effect of the activity.
There’s only so much you can spend at a ski resort. Casinos there is literally no limit. The high roller salons can have games with 10k+ per hand/game or more.
A 7-day-card at the Semmering costs € ~280, the sports hotel there is another € ~800 and then let's price in €~600 for food. So an entire week-long ski holiday in the alps costs you around € 1.700.
I will not try to argue if this is much or little, just trying to add some context for those not familiar with popular skiing tourism destinations.
We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.
Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.
You're spot on (ex casino worker). There's no conspiracy. Speaking for myself, I was nice to people because it made me more money in tips (also, because I am not an a-hole). Made a lot of "friends" when I worked in the casino, employees and patrons. It's not any different than folks I work with in tech (i.e. some you connect with and have genuine friendships and some are work friends). They likely stopped calling her due to upper management telling staff to not engage due to legal liability (or they lose their job).
edit: Additionally, there are whales and there are folks who's job it is to get them in the door (we had game managers for the big games).
A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.
The first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.
I remember that one and remember being super exasperated about not being able to do anything without paying upfront for it. Ended up switching to Club Penguin instead lol.
This sort of scheme was banned in the UK - the place where bookmaking was invented, and many of the largest global brands are run from (albeit technically trading from Malta or Gibrlatar) - a few years back.
Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.
If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:
- VIP schemes kill people
- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do
- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in
I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).
> these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy
With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.
> not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.
Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.
There are "steam game library" addicts though.
> this majority isn't the target customer
Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?
That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.
The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.
The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.
> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.
There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.
I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.
Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.
New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.
> the profits largely benefited the education system.
The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.
What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).
I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune.
I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.
When I was in college I got lured into one of those pyramid schemes advertised in the middle of the night hoping to make extra money. I wonder how much money I would have lost if I had instant access to betting on a "sure thing" back then.
and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.
If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)
But it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).
Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.
Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics
The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.
It's obviously a joke, but joking that a bad thing is actually good because of some surface-level benefit does raise the question of whether it even has that surface-level benefit.
What a strawman. Murder is done to other people. Gambling is something people do themselves consensually. Murder is banned and people universally condemn it. Gambling is banned and people have always been generally tolerant of it.
These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.
When making decisions like this, one should consider not just the desired consequences of the policy, but the difficulty in actually implementing it. Alcohol and narcotics prohibitions fall short here.
It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.
The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.
I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.
Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.
Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.
If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?
There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.
Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.
And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency
Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless
Honest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.
Gambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.
Gambling is a symptom of pre-depression or fulminant one. It's a defensive mechanism, quasi suicidal, in an attempt to distract the person from the real problems. It's the behavioural equivalent of drug addiction. Advertising it is sad for the victims and should be illegal. But... money
I strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.
I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.
The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?
Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.
Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
Gambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.
Gambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch
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> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.
Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.
>Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.
She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!
To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.
I will not try to argue if this is much or little, just trying to add some context for those not familiar with popular skiing tourism destinations.
We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.
Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.
edit: Additionally, there are whales and there are folks who's job it is to get them in the door (we had game managers for the big games).
Here are some examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/feb/...
https://frontofficesports.com/lawsuit-says-draftkings-vip-pr...
> this isn't new.
Bullshit.
If the person you’re raising kids with starts living at the casino 1-4 days a week, you notice.
The Internet, for better and for worse, masks this.
A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.
Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.
Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.
If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:
- VIP schemes kill people
- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do
- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in
I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).
> these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy
With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.
> not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.
Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.
There are "steam game library" addicts though.
> this majority isn't the target customer
Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?
The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.
The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.
> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.
There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.
I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.
Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.
New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.
> the profits largely benefited the education system.
The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.
What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).
and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...
> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.
The unwashed poors though... they are SOL.
>
It increases GDPI want this rigorously studied.
If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)
>
It's obviously a tongue in cheek commentBut it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).
Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.
Yes, as evidenced by the full court press advertising.
How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?
Limiting gambling ads the same way might be a good step.
It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.
>
Remember when alcohol was illegal?I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.
Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.
Recognizing this fact isn't treating them like children, it's treating them like the adults they are.
If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?
Why or why not?
Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.
Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless
+ in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets
+ 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble
+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue
I don't know of any long term profitable sports gamblers - but that makes sense because why reveal yourself and your methods if you're profitable?
By long term I mean at least 1,000 bets while still being profitable. Even more impressive if they are making a living off of it.
The only person I can think of is Picks Office on Twitter.
The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?
Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.
Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy