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I think it's how the gambling interacts with the card play, there's a punishment for being wrong. And it teaches you to not be so reliant on random chance, to beat your opponents with your chips and not your cards. A lot of the things I learned at the poker tables of my youth have helped later in life, I just wish the lessons in when to say when I got in the rest of life had transfered to the table. I will say everybody should find their addiction and actually allow it to mess them up once, it's a very interesting sensation to know you should get up and leave and not be able to, and there's a very valuable life lesson in being completely helpless to yourself once. It taught me a lot about self control and why it's a good thing.

I just meant that in poker, there is the "Win the hand" aspect which is pure card-play, and the "Win Money" aspect, which is gambling, and that the object of course is the latter, not the former, and anyone who plays the former is going to end up broke.

By which I meant-- Beginning poker-players tend to stay in hands for too long, because they're interested in the card-play aspect (seeing if they can finish that straight, etc.), when more experienced players see folding the hand as just as "interesting" a move as trying to draw that needed card.

There is a big difference between the gambling-game and card-play game in poker. There's not such a big difference in Bridge, where card-play translates pretty much directly to success at the gambling aspect.