>Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour.<p>This is an odd thing about gambling when compared to drugs, prostitution or other vices. Gambling can scale up to consume whatever amount of money you happen to have.<p>It is no doubt a lot but there is some upper bound on how much heroin/cocaine/whatever you can consume without outright killing yourself.<p>Similarly, there is some upper bound on how much any single human can spend on prostitutes.<p>Gambling has no upper bound. It can scale up infinitely in line with the gamblers financial means.<p>I don't know what that theoretical cost ceiling is for drugs and prostitution but I'd hazard a guess and say its way lower than $36 million per hour.
><i>There is one habit that even the brattiest clients tend to avoid: getting blindingly drunk. When you’re gaming at such astronomical dollar values, after all, it’s critical to keep your wits.</i><p>The author would be surprised. Besides, those are only "astronomical" for them and their salary, not for e.g. oil heirs. It's not like those people came there to strategically win...<p>><i>Also in the category of demands that can’t be fulfilled: hookers.</i><p>Yeah, right.<p>><i>Requests for drugs—usually cocaine—are also once-a-week occurrences that come with a hard “no.” (Unless, of course, butlers see a valid prescription.)</i><p>Or, you know, if a employee working at the casino will make a thousand $ for their middleman role, for little risk.
"Almost all of the clients are men, ranging in age from millennials to 70-year-olds, and they stick around for three to five years before going dark—usually due to bad investments, dips in the economy, or divorce."<p>This entire article made me sick to my stomach, money can be so terribly corrupting and empty.
This line does more than almost anything else I've read to explain the wealth disparity between the 1%ers and the rest of the world:<p>> "Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour. (That nearly matches the 2017 gross domestic product of Tuvalu: $40 million.)"
> Some guests are completely phobic about having anything thrown away, lest the discarded object be something lucky. Hot winning streaks may be accompanied by mounds of cigarette ashes, crumpled paper, or random assortments of trash. It’s so common, most butlers know never to remove anything from a gaming table without triple-checking.<p>... what is the worldview of these people?
If you're interested in reading about the darker side of gambling, I recommend this long-form from The Atlantic: "How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts."<p>"Did Scott Stevens die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim of a system carefully calibrated to prey on his weakness?"<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/losing-it-all/505814/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/losing-...</a>
I worked as a cashier at a riverboat casino in the midwest. Some nights I would be in the little cage in the high limit slot area. About once a month a specific woman would come in and take a whole row of the $10 and $25 slots (around 10 machines) and just walk up and down the row putting coins in the machine, hitting the button, and moving on to the next machine without even waiting to see if she won.
Oh well. I don't think any of these "high net worth" clients are actually there to make money.. they're probably there to blow away a few million that they can recover easily from other investments or revenue sources. Re: cheese and sweeping things from hotels.. lol, they're human afterall :)
>... not even James Bond could charm his way through the door.<p>Oww, come on ... James Bond of course could if he wanted to, the issue is that they insist on stirring Martini's:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaken,_not_stirred" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaken,_not_stirred</a>
The part where they talk about denying people spending >$1mm the fulfillment of orders for drugs or sex that amount to $500-1000 is ridiculous farce.<p>They don’t operate in a vacuum, and a casino that won’t cater to legitimate and reasonable demands of a high roller will lose them to one who does, duh.