This is pretty much me, I gamble for fun and excitement. So far I didn't win big yet and I didn't lose big either, so my life can't really be worse or better than without gambling. This is mostly due to my strict limits on how much I gamble each months. Once I lost all my gambling budget for the week I stop, and when I make some profits I always withdraw a part from it. The important thing is to always have some balance for another day. When looking at the impact on our life I think it's wrong to only look at the profit we make, we also need to take the opportunity cost into consideration. In my case I would have spend a lot of money going to bars in the evening instead of gambling at home, which would have made it more difficult to quit smoking. In that sense gambling helped me to control my life better.