I like your answer that we have to protect ourselves and avoid spending a lot and to have more losses. Because that's how it starts for most of the gamblers that have lost a lot and no longer can control themselves.
While they are very ambitious, there is nothing wrong being like that but we know our limits and we know where to set our feet and accept that we can only move a little by little in hitting our goals.
By protecting ourselves into not falling into many big losses while gambling also helps to maintain our long time stay in the game. Carelessly betting and not putting down some risk factor to abide by just makes you see gambling in a different form and could make you leave the gambling space sooner. It is clear that participating in gambling could make a gambler to be very ambitious, but trailing with care and applying risk management will make you not to be an addict which can lead to more and more loss and eventually exit from the space after broken down from it. Betting little by little will enable you hit the goal with time.
And I can't help but ask if there are still people who set goals of what they want to achieve from gambling even in this modern days?
Back in the day, I used to have a friend who as quite obsessed with gambling and would often tell me that his goal from gambling was to make enough money that he would use to buy a land, build his choiced house, buy a good car, get married and start raising his own family, this was way back 2014 or so when I was still working for a company in one of the states here in my country.
I later got separated from this friend of mine though we didn't lose contact.
I spoke with him of recently and the dude is still working in the very same company where we meet in 2014 and I left him there in 2017, I asked him about gambling and he responded saying that he is still into it but hasn't been lucky enough with it, I simply advised him to quit gambling and living in fantasy and now focus on gathering that money he was wasting on gambling and try to set up a business for himself so he can quit working 6 to 7 job.
I personally have don't think is feasible to set goals with gambling, where as we know that nothing here is guaranteed, setting goals can turn out to be the reason why a person may end up becoming an addict to gambling.