Then it's contradictory to the idea of being a stress-relief if you would be more stressed on worrying about winning or losing. Don't get me wrong everyone wants to win, but to what extent do we consider it as having fun?
The interesting thing is that we are not interested (I like this turn of phrase) in playing games where we can't lose anything. As I pointed out earlier in the thread, we could play the same dice using the test mode of a gambling bot (e.g. Seuntjies DiceBot), but I don't think we would get a lot of pleasure out of this activity. And now we have two extremes. At one extreme, we must expect to lose something in order to make a game interesting to us, and, at the other extreme, losses can be quite worrying and far from being fun (let alone being a stress-reliever)
Winning (or should I say having a win-streak) is like
feeding our own
ego. From a positive perspective, it gives us
confidence that makes our decision more decisive than usual and trusting whatever that may be. In contrast, it makes us
cocky and temporarily forgets that there's a possibility to lose, after all, gambling is not biased to anyone
Yes, wins definitely rub our egos
At some point, it could make you the role of a king, but at the same time, it could make you the role of a beggar. And by that, I hardly think gambling could be a stress-reliever to the majority of people
That point also bothers me
Deep inside, somehow I don't buy into this theory about gambling being a stress-reliever in general. On the contrary, I'd rather say it gives us an adrenaline rush which makes us feel alive (again) when we feel bored. Put differently, there is no relief of stress as our inner and subconscious longings for gambling are more about receiving some portion of stress instead of getting rid of it. Whether you can control the amount of this stress and keep it manageable is another question, though