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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.

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.

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!).

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.
remember when gambling was illegal?

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...

It was a quaint, simpler time. Now we are much more sophisticated and modern.
If you’ve seen Back to the Future 2, you would know we’re in this state because Biff got the Sports Almanac
All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
It increases GDP. Also, have you seen the Dow?
Humans have tried to ban gambling for as long as gambling existed, and gambling has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Gambling still exists.
Remember when alcohol was illegal? Ahh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of the 1920s.

How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?

and the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples:

+ 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

"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...

>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.

The house always wins.

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.

If you profit at sports betting they limit your bet size severely
Sports betting is the one place that "prediction markets" make the most sense. Instead of there being a house to win against, the market just skims a fee. The line is set organically by betters, not be the house targeting a profit margin, and the house has no incentive to restrict successful betters because they solely profit on flow, not losses.
I used to work for a sports betting company. These people definitely exist. They are few though because they are the ones who understand that the sport/game/match/whatever is irrelevant. They bet the "odd line". They bet on the platform that screwed up and didn't adjust their line quickly enough to follow the market. They don't know baseball, or football, or tennis. They just know the numbers.
What about Frank Rosenthal? Admittedly these guys are extremely rare, that's why the handful of successful ones are famous.
We all have the occasional friend that brags about every time he wins money at the casino. If you accompany them a few times, it’s incredible how the “always winning” story just changes.
Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC seems to be managing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/dec/05/brighton-ow...

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.
Already is in Nevada.
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.
> For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling

Does that include the Christmas lottery? If so then that’s not really comparable.

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
Society needs to stop making blanket statements about psychological behaviours:

https://immunizenevada.org/the-relationship-between-adhd-and...

I’m not sure that explains the sort of casual gambling on anything at all people might do among friends.
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.
Is there a causal relationship? If so, in which direction does it flow?
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.

I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.
I’m a pretty right leaning libertarian. That said there are some hills I’ll abandon like smoking bans and this being legal.
American citizens have willingly given up their freedom and allowed themselves to be captured by corporate control.
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.
>but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.

What's the implication here? "In for a penny, in for a pound", so might as well legalize every other form of gambling?

There are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game.

At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?

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

Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy