On my honeymoon 7 years ago my wife and I took a very expensive 13-day Mediterranean cruise on a huge ship with a casino. One afternoon I went there and spent $300 over about an hour.
One time a coworker asked me and another friend to go to the casino with her, her mom and her boyfriend after work and me and my friend said yes. We arrive and when we walk in we are told "if you sign up for our players card you get 20 dollars preloaded for free"... What the hell why not, free 20 dollars. Everyone besides me and my friend had one already so we said we'll meet you inside once we get the card.
So we go to the counter and fill out their one page form, take maybe 10 minutes being generous. We get the card and go to walk onto the floor, keep in mind this place only had machine games, no tables or anything and my coworker is walking out with her family. "what's up? I thought you were playing." she responds "nah, we are leaving, we already lost $1500"
Somehow they lost $500 each in under 10 minutes... I still don't know how.
I went to the casino with friends around 12 years ago. We agreed to get a few coins (around 20€ or so) at the beginning, play them and leave once we run out of coins.
Everyone lost their coins except me, I left with like 27€. It was the only time I went to the casino.
So now I can never go in a casino again ! I have a perfect record, I've always won against the casino and I intend to keep it this way my whole life.
An important thing to keep in mind when gambling is that luck isn't real. You can get lucky, but you can't be lucky. It's all statistics, and if you play long enough the casino always wins. Odds are a few people gain some money, but more money is always lost than gained, and you'll eventually be a loser.
If you do the math, there is literally 0% chance of winning in most gambling. Especially because of the fact plenty of them are rigged.
Arguably the safer bet if one wants to gamble is stock investing, but only after doing due research and willing to be patient to see its results. For those willing to do CFD stock trading, the person would require not just research and patience, but also nerves of steel not to panic.
But I think that most addicted gamblers don't like the win, they just want the dopamine hit of playing.
I went to a casino once because my roommate at the time wanted to go for a bit. He even spotted me $10 because I had no cash on me. Turned that $10 in to $40, paid back the roommate and left with the $30 and never went back.
When i was in Australia, i was kinda surprised how widespread gambling was. There were some gambling machines in almost every pub. I put 5 dollars in a machine and won 50. Never ever gambled again.
There's a study on this... I o py remember it pretty vaguely, but the tl;dr was that if people win at gambling it doesn't hold much appeal -- the initial drive to continue gambling only comes after losses. Something about 'making up for' anything you lost drives the addiction behaviour far more. This struck me initially as kinda counter-intuitive (you'd think that people were more motivated by behaviours with positive outcomes, right?) so it always stuck in my head...
It's kind of nice that some things have carried over from red-it, like the same memes popping up repeatedly, and people in the comments (me) complaining about it.
My partner and half his family have this gambling bug. You can see it in their eyes. You can see it when they win (not that often.) You see it in the veiled "next time we will win" excuses when they lose (most of the time.) I am glad I don't have ....this vice.
Seriously though, if anyone feels they MUST do some optional thing its likely time to take a break. That goes equally for something you consume or something you do.