The gambling industry today is the Wild West 150 years ago
The modern gambling market looks like the Wild West after industrialization. On paper, it is no longer chaos. There is a sheriff, courts, laws, and rules. But real power, just like a hundred and fifty years ago, does not belong to the law. It belongs to those who control the flow of people, money, and information.
Let’s map out who these power brokers are, what roles they play, and how the system perpetuates itself.
The Power Structure
Landowners and ranch barons
The landowners are today's casinos and betting operators. They control the territory and set the rules. The entire system is on their side: the sheriff, the courts, the newspapers, the telegraph, and everyone else.
Their ultimate goal is all of the prospectors' money. Information asymmetry makes this easy. The prospector takes the risk. The landowner monetizes it. The target is not a single player, but a continuous flow.
How do they achieve this? Through two core mechanisms.
Saloon
The casino interface is the saloon. It is the place where prospectors' money disappears. The saloon is engineered down to the smallest detail. Every button and every design element is built to manipulate behavior1 and maximize profit. The sheriff’s requirements are followed only formally2.
Gold Mine
The gold mine is jackpots, max wins, and bonuses that attract players. The landowners’ job is to keep prospectors ignorant about the real odds and risks3. Winning probabilities are secret. The true value of bonuses cannot be calculated. House edge is replaced with a manipulative metric called RTP, return to player.
Workers and prospectors
These are ordinary players who hope to make money, or at least get back what they spent. They are the fuel of the system.
The most valuable fuel of all, the one that feeds most of the system4, is saloon debtors: problem gamblers. The entire system is stacked against them. Newspapers, the telegraph, saloons, touts, minstrels, street performers, bartenders — all of them live off the money of workers and prospectors. Any gambling advertising is inherently misleading to players.5 The structure itself makes harm inevitable.
The sheriff is powerless. He can only try to minimize the harm. But the prospectors need tools. That's where the next players come in.
Pickaxes and shovels
The sellers of pickaxes and shovels are game manufacturers, the providers. They cannot exist without the landowners and the mines, just as casinos cannot exist without games.
Pickaxes and shovels are engineered to maximize addictiveness. They rely on mechanics such as losses disguised as wins: a €1 bet returns €0.40, yet the game delivers winning sounds and triumphant visual effects.
Another core mechanism is the near miss. In some jurisdictions, the sheriff has banned deliberately programmed near misses. In response, manufacturers use near misses by design. For example, two jackpot symbols appear, while the third stops one position above. The brain interprets this outcome as “almost made it.”.
Fake animations add another layer of manipulation. They create an illusion of randomness even though the outcome has already been determined by the game’s logic.
Finally, there is multiline play and frequent small reinforcements. Players tend to prefer multi line games, and certain features make the experience feel more rewarding and more absorbing, even when the expected value remains exactly the same.
Touts
But tools alone don’t bring prospectors to town. Someone has to tell them where the gold is.
Affiliates are one of the most powerful forces in the ecosystem. They do not own saloons and they do not produce games. They have no mines. But they control the narrative.
They have not just captured Google search results. They have flooded the entire internet. Articles disguised as journalism are written by marketers and neural networks. In this endless stream of informational noise, players never encounter academic research or genuinely useful information.
The more a player loses, the more an “independent review site” earns. This structural conflict has not gone unnoticed. The Danish government has proposed legislation banning affiliates from operating under commission models based on player losses or turnover.
Newspapers
Beyond affiliates, mass media plays its own role in the ecosystem.
In newspapers, advertising for mines and saloons is formally banned. Another symbolic victory for the sheriff. In reality, social media platforms earn billions from gambling advertising.
Formally, these platforms claim to fight illegal advertising. In practice, they create the appearance of enforcement. Illegal gambling ads generate around 10% of revenue, while only about 0.15% of revenue is spent on combating them6.
Street performers and minstrels
If traditional advertising is restricted, modern entertainment picks up the slack.
Streamers and influencers provide a constant inflow of prospectors. Their audience is young, and the streaming format normalizes gambling, creates the illusion of easy wins, and funnels users toward weakly regulated platforms.
Regular exposure to slot streams is associated with more positive attitudes toward gambling and a higher likelihood of transitioning to real money play. Slot streaming functions as a mechanism of engagement and normalization of gambling behavior, especially among young and vulnerable users, even without explicit advertising messages.
The economics are simple: street performers and minstrels do not risk their own money, unlike the prospectors they attract. They showcase large wins, creating a distorted picture of the odds.
As with touts, their income is directly proportional to player losses. They bear no responsibility and face no accountability. Street performers and minstrels earn money without committing their own capital and without bearing risk.
The sheriff
So where is law enforcement in all this?
Sheriffs exist. They are the regulators. Their job is not justice, but manageability. They make sure there are self exclusion buttons and responsible gambling reports. Their hands are tied, and their requirements are met only formally.
They never touch the foundation: information asymmetry, manipulative design, addictive game mechanics, and financial incentives.
The sheriff’s power varies by territory. In some districts the sheriff has more authority, in others less. There are rare exceptions where the sheriff has extensive powers and strong political backing. In those cases, all participants in the system move to uncontrolled territories where the sheriff has no influence at all. This is the offshore market, and it is vast. In Europe, for example, it accounts for around 71% of a €114.3 billion market (approximately $134.13 billion).
In these places, conditions for the prospector are even worse. Even if gold is found, taking it away is far more difficult. Advertising is more aggressive. There are no courts and no protection. The sheriff is powerless here as well.
Bankers
Money has to flow somehow. That’s where the financial infrastructure comes in.
Payment systems run the financial infrastructure. The most common method is credit and debit cards7, with some regional exceptions. In territories beyond the sheriff’s reach, decentralized payment systems are more popular8, primarily cryptocurrencies.
But centralized payment methods also operate in these areas, carefully structured so the sheriff does not notice. This includes cards issued by exotic banks and miscoding - routing transactions through categories like “professional services.”
Visa and Mastercard are understood to profit from these arrangements, earning a small fee on every transaction.
Bankers care about reputation, but the revenue is too attractive to walk away from.
These are the main power brokers. But the ecosystem extends far beyond them.
The rest of the system
Fake towns
Boomtowns emerged around a gold strike, a railroad, or even a rumor. They were built in weeks, disappeared in months, and often had no real economy.
The fake towns of today are white label casinos. A ready made infrastructure: mines, saloons, bankers, pickaxe sellers, all formally under the sheriff’s authority. They are especially common in offshore jurisdictions.9
They are popular because entry is fast and cheap. The entire setup is handled by town or land companies. The owners focus only on traffic acquisition. These towns open quickly, shut down quickly, and reopen under new names.
Some fake towns eventually become real10. Most are doomed from the start.
Town and land companies
These companies planned towns turnkey before any residents arrived. They built cities with a minimal set of functions, and if the project failed, they abandoned it and started a new one.
In online gambling, these are platform aggregators.
They build the town: the engine and the site design.
They appoint the sheriff: obtain a license.
They negotiate with game providers and payment processors.
They take a commission from player losses.
They may provide customer support and risk management.
The largest aggregators have enormous resources and traffic, giving them the ability to influence pickaxe sellers, the towns they build, and potentially even the sheriff himself.
Telegraph
Beyond physical infrastructure, there’s an invisible layer: information systems.
Analytics, tracking, algorithms, antifraud systems, and risk models are the telegraph of the Wild West. Information moves faster than the prospectors.
By the time a player makes a deposit, the system already knows their IP address, device fingerprint, behavioral patterns, how much they lost last time, the real odds, risks, and probabilities.
The telegraph works for the landowner. The casino knows almost everything about the player. The player knows almost nothing.
Surveyors and inspectors
Even in the Wild West, there were people claiming to ensure fairness. Auditors and independent testing laboratories verify that games are fair. They certify software and test RNGs.
The problem is that they are hired by casinos, not by players. Like the sheriff, they do not examine the foundations: information asymmetry, manipulative design, addictive game mechanics, and financial incentives.
Most auditors are professionally honest. But the conflict of interest is structural. They check whether declared boundaries match reality. Whether the map itself is fair is outside their mandate.
Hired guns
Risk, fraud, AML, and KYC teams are the Pinkertons, the baron’s private police. Their job is not primarily to catch thieves, though that happens too. Their real task is to protect house edge.
They go after fraudsters, carders, multi account users, and advantage players. Sometimes ordinary players get caught in the crossfire. The operating principle is simple: shoot first, sort it out later.
Smugglers
But not all actors pretend to be legitimate. This is the entire PPC traffic promoting offshore gambling. Millions of fake accounts and disposable mobile apps. They funnel prohibited traffic while platforms create the appearance of enforcement and earn billions from it.
Bandits
The creators of fake apps copy the design of popular products but operate as outright scams. They accept deposits and refuse to pay out winnings. They also run advertising on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and TikTok using fake accounts.
Snake oil merchants
Promises of fast or easy money. “Unique systems.” Martingale, Fibonacci, d’Alembert, tipsters. Strategies that cannot work by definition because of the house edge.
Affiliates benefit when players gamble more, which is why some of them are openly predatory and deliberately misleading.
Judges
ADR, alternative dispute resolution bodies, handle player complaints and reviews. Formally, they are independent. In practice, some are funded by casinos, others earn money from player losses, and others manipulate reviews.
The conflict of interest is structural, except in cases where player protection is the sole source of funding.
Street children
Some participants in this system had no choice about being there. Underage players and teenagers. They slip into saloons. Saloons have an incentive not to notice future customers.
According to a UK Gambling Commission study from 2023, 26% of children aged 11–17 spent money on gambling. If legally permitted youth activities such as arcade machines (penny pushers and claw grabs) are excluded, around 4% spent money on regulated forms of gambling. More than half of them had been exposed to gambling advertising.
Bartenders
Customer support and VIP managers. They are friendly, helpful, and create the illusion of care.
They are often trained in retention techniques and communicate using predefined scripts. Some support agents genuinely empathize with players. But their KPIs are retention and reactivation. If a player leaves, the manager loses their bonus.
The system rewards care for profit, not for the person.
Enemies of the system
Not everyone serves the barons. Some players reject their assigned roles entirely.
Cowboy
The Hollywood image of the cowboy, unlike the real one, became a symbol of freedom and individualism. In this system, cowboys are advantage players.
They understand how the system works and exploit its weaknesses for profit. They do not break the law, but they break the economics. That is why they are pushed out, through legal and extralegal means.
For the system, they are worse than fraudsters. A fraudster can be caught and punished under the law. An advantage player can only be banned and, if possible, declared illegitimate.
This is why, despite the absence of any wrongdoing, they are treated as criminals. Their profiles sit in databases. Their methods are studied. Hired guns are sent after them.
Preachers and reformers
Then there are those who fight the system itself.
Independent researchers, academics, journalists, and anti gambling activists. They fight information asymmetry, advertising, and manipulation.
They publish research on how slot machines are designed to maximize time on device and how opaque these systems are. They produce hundreds of papers on harm, addiction, and advertising. They document victim stories. They lobby for restrictions and bans.
They are not heard. The mass audience often does not even know they exist. Their content loses by design. A forty page academic paper versus a bright streamer video. Their work does not surface in Google search. Charts and tables versus ads promising big wins.
At times, attempts are made to influence them11. Sometimes they are blown up in their cars or killed by a bullet while walking along a beach.
Conclusion
The entire system exists at the expense of the prospector. It is a single pie, divided in different proportions.
Payment systems, deposits and cashouts, take a small percentage, roughly from 1% to 7%, from every transaction, regardless of outcome and regardless of laws or regulation.
Game providers create addictive and opaque products, hide real odds and probabilities, and earn from player losses, roughly in the range of 5% to 15%.
Platforms, the ones that create hundreds or thousands of white label casinos, earn directly from player losses, approximately 10% to 15%.
Affiliates, influencers, and streamers advertise wins and normalize gambling. They earn from player losses, sometimes up to 50%. This can come from payments per deposit, hybrid deals, or sponsorship contracts.
The state earns through taxation, typically from 1% to 25%.
Advertising platforms earn from impressions, clicks, and installs, regardless of player outcomes.
The casino takes whatever remains after all other participants and operating costs. It profits from losses and uses every available legal and illegal method, including manipulative techniques, to increase those losses.
Everyone takes their cut. But the distribution of power is not equal. The final question within this metaphor is simple.
Who holds the greatest wealth and power?
In the real Wild West, railroad companies decided the fate of towns. They did not own saloons or gold mines, but they controlled access. A town bypassed by the tracks died within three years.
In gambling, power and influence are distributed across many actors. But the greatest benefit with the least risk, in my view, belongs to payment systems and advertising platforms, which bear virtually no risk themselves and are critically essential to the system’s survival.
The railroad does not own the saloons. It owns access. And while the prospector believes the next shovel will bring gold, the train keeps moving along tracks that were never laid for him.
In the Wild West, you could burn down a saloon. You could shoot the baron. You could drive out the sheriff. But you could not stop the railroad. You could not kill hope.
The railroad decided where cities would exist. Hope decided who would come to them. As long as both exist, the system is unbeatable.
The term "manipulation" here refers to three categories of design tactics:
Sludge. Harmful frictions that make beneficial actions harder. Withdrawing money, closing an account, or setting limits are deliberately slowed down, buried, or complicated.
Dark patterns. Deceptive UI and UX techniques that push users toward actions that benefit the operator. Bigger deposits, higher stakes, longer play sessions. Safer gambling tools are hidden, minimized, or made less visible.
Dark nudges. The broadest layer. Any design tactic that makes people act worse, often by exploiting cognitive biases. Affect heuristic. Framing. Illusion of control. Gambler’s fallacy.
Gambling operators in the United Kingdom systematically use sludge strategies when implementing mandatory warning labels, undermining the effectiveness of consumer protection measures.
How exactly positive regulation was neutralized:
Limits are opt-in, not default
Setting limits requires effort, navigation, and time
Increasing limits is easier than lowering them
Warnings are framed neutrally or positively
Risk messages compete with far stronger promotional cues
Safer-gambling tools are visually and spatially de-prioritized
Reality checks interrupt play without changing incentives
This turns regulation into symbolic compliance.
Players have no access to a game’s internal parameters, including reel layouts, symbol frequencies, or the actual odds of winning.
The Pareto principle has also proven to be relevant in traditional land-based gambling.
In Australia, it was found that among loyalty card members, 2% of gamblers accounted for 80% of revenue. In Ontario, 4.8% of players classified as problem gamblers generated up to approximately 61% of slot machine revenue.
More recent UK evidence shows strong concentration of losses: in operator account data, the top 10% of customers (by staking volume) generated 79% of operator revenue. In an open-banking sample, the top 10% of accounts by net spend accounted for 87.5% of total net losses.
Six ways gambling advertising misleads players:
Focusing on wins, despite the fact that around 99% of customers lose.
Dependence on problem gamblers. Around 79–88% of losses come from the 10% of players who gamble at harmful levels.
False socialization. Advertising shows groups of friends having fun. The reality is isolation and loneliness.
Deceptive bonuses. “Free bets” with unclear conditions hidden in fine print.
Unfavorable accumulator bets. The exploitation of cognitive errors to increase bookmakers’ profits.
Counterproductive warnings. Messages like “gamble responsibly” do not work, while “safer gambling” advertising can actually increase the urge to gamble.
For scale: one illegal operator spent €67 million on ads before being blocked.
Payment methods vary by jurisdiction. For example, in the United Kingdom, around 81% of gambling payments are made using debit cards.
In 2024, gambling conducted via cryptocurrency generated around €80 billion in gross gambling revenue.
Even within a single regulated market, the scale is striking. According to the UK Government Gambling White Paper published in 2023, there are around 750 active white label arrangements spread across nearly 40 licences, with a small number of licensees controlling the majority.
The report explicitly notes that the white label model creates consumer protection risks and allows a small group of operators to control a disproportionately large number of brands.
One notable example is Heather Wardle. In 2021, concerns were raised that the head of the GambleAware charity attempted to influence the wording of a press release related to research on regular sports bettors in Britain.