I think its not hard to be a responsible player, but its hard to build «past» to be prepared to be responsible. From my vision, a person who has enough money, knows lots of ways how to earn them (not only in theory), have stable income, can gamble responsibly and greed will never lure him to dark side. Its not easy to become such a person, but if someone managed to become like it, he wont have problems with gambling.
If it's that easy to be responsible gambler, I wonder why there are many gamblers out there that are losing money because of wrong decisions.
Being a responsible might be easy, but in reality, it's hard. Gambler can change their mood from being responsible, to being greedy in an instant especially if they're winning consecutive times already. Most of the gamblers aren't contented with their winnings, and they always have this feeling where they feel that they can win more after maybe doubling or tripling their money. It's hard to be a responsible gambler for most because of their mindset as well. What I believe is that, if we are responsible outside of gambling, we can carry it over, and be responsible as well in gambling.
That is true, when we say that we wanted to be a responsible gambler, then that's it. However, in practice, specially in we are in that situation, that's where's we totally forget about. And recently, I heard about the story and this is one factor that the recovering addicts shares.
In the beginning, when he lost we wanted to recover. And then he said to himself, that once I recovered, then I will quit. But once he was in that situation, he said that or what reason he gave is that since he is already there so what not aim for some win? And then the pattern goes until he become addicted.