And what do you think, does refusal to play (deprivation) contribute to recovery from addiction or is it useless?
Depriving yourself to gamble will never help in the recovery of gambling addicition. The more you deprive yourself the more you will have the urge to play.
If you really want to stop and escape from addiction, it's better to do it small-steps at a time so your mind and body will be able to adjust properly. Stopping instantly might cause some withdrawal and likely bring you back into gambling again.
Weaning doesn’t mean stopping instantly, it’s a gradual process and in this case I think mixing gambling with other forms of entertainment- so instead of spending the entire hour gambling you’d share it between two different things and keep doing like that and each time you’d keep reducing the time you spend on gambling until you can now free stay without gambling and just focus on whatever it was that you used initially to allocate the gambling time.
I think this method would work effectively for some people if it’s properly handled and also if they are able to identify something that can take their mind off of gambling while they are engaged in the activity. Unless they are able to identify something like that then weaning or depriving yourself would just create more cravings.