A common trend I see here in Gambling Discussion are people making threads complaining how they lost money, etc while playing. I bet they were not complaining while they were winning.
There's only on way to prevent gambling going out of hand and it also applies to other areas of life... Create a budget AND stick to it.
Set a monthly limit, a fund for everything entertainment-related. Use that up within a month or not, it gets topped up monthly and that's the only money you can use for gambling.
I have been doing this for years. By making a special budget for gambling, from that moment I did not feel the slightest loss even though I lost in gambling because the budget was indeed provided and prepared to be lost. Then, when I lost the gamble I did not regret it because the lost money did not interfere with other economies.
It only really becomes a problem once it starts taking more and more money that is needed for some other things.
Seems most people would really like to have a limit on the max gambling money, it's just they have a hard time sticking to the budget. I suppose they can minimize the likelihood of dipping into money reserved for something else by immediately making that money unavailable for gambling (auto-deduct payment for utilities, etc).
I remember someone saying "If you are afraid of falling, then don't place yourself in a position where you would fall".