~snip~
Sometimes I think that addiction is to be with the financial status of a gambler. If a gambler is rich and he does not care much about the money, he will usually play excessive gambling and sooner or later will become addicted to it. On the other hand, a person like me, will think twice about the risk involved in gambling and will try to gamble with limited money, so that the loss incurred is also low. That may be another reason why the poor gamblers remain poor because they do not take the risk (which is good to some extent) while rich gamblers may become richer if they win big or they become addicted to it (and also lose a lot of money).
I think that there are very few addicted gamblers that are rich.
Mainly for two reasons:
First is that most rich people understand that gambling has a negative estimated value, so they probably won't be gambling.
Second is that if a rich person starts gambling their money, they will quickly stop being rich as they will most probably lose all their money very quickly.
So, in the end, not many rich people are gambling in any given moment of time.