The casino is the mouse-trap, the gambler is the mouse - a clear predator prey relationship, yet so normalised in our era.
There is a higher buzz in the brain where chance is involved instead of certainty, such as if the one you love will say yes or not. There are natural gambles when a child sets out to catch a butterfly or a frog. Yet what happens when the healthy ways to gamble are no longer enough to cover up an absence of steady and dependable love in childhood, well, that's when you get a gambler, that's when they become the prey of every empathy-deficient swindler and mobster out to whatever money they can at their expense. The casinos are where the vulnerable are legally robbed and the criminals live large on their gains.
Gamblers are the fodder of the casino machine, made by the emotional indifference of society and punished by the same.
The gambler is a fawn in the forest, trying its best to look as if it is all grown up. It is not. Psychologically it is too damaged to grow into a mature person. And so it enters the den of predators who wear high-end suits, ready for the skinning.
He'd become afraid of love, the only cure for what ailed him, and so turned to the sickly addiction of gambling and ignored the ruination that would follow.