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Comment by carefulfungi | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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.

I think you might be underestimating how much money can be spent at a ski resort.

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.

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).

Yes, I think the grandparent post conflates those whale-attractors with typical service industry behaviors toward repeat customers.

High end hospitality is different from exploiting compulsive behaviors of addiction.

Here are some examples:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/feb/...

https://frontofficesports.com/lawsuit-says-draftkings-vip-pr...

While I'm certainly no supporter of casinos, I think that online gambling is a difference in kind.

We’re regulars at a resort we go to annually.

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.

> 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.

The same thing happens with in-app purchases.

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.

Algorithmic optimisation will be the death of us.

Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.

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.

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