Someone who is addicted to gambling to the extent that he sells assets or property just to gamble is very difficult to recover from, even doctors or psychologists will not be able to cure him.
If he can recover, he will not recover completely but rather forget about gambling and when in his daily life he still sees gambling activities he can easily return to gambling and become an addict again.
Gambling addiction must be treated as any other addiction, the first step is to realize that there is a problem, then talk about the problem and the last step is to work on a solution, but most of gambling addicts are chasing looses on the long road, and that never has a happy end.
Betting back to the topic, I don't think is the same, chasing losses is different, and the fact that someone says "I will be betting until win" is a risky move because bad streaks can be really bad and lead to a huge loss.
It's even more dangerous than some other addictions, but you are right that it needs to be taken care of before things get out of hand because the more one gambles the deeper one dive into it, and as you said, they don't get out at the other end happily. Gambling addiction ruins lives, and we've seen it and usually see it around us all the time.
People need to learn from the existing examples of those people who ruined their lives by only trying to recover their losses which kept causing them more losses until they gambled away everything they had. They realize it sometimes but only when everything is gone, which is a very late realization.