There is psychological research documentation noting that gambling addicts intentionally, though on a subconscious level, play games of chance until they lose everything. This formidable symptom of a gambling addiction can reach an extreme, one example having been aptly demonstrated in the film Owning Mahowny. The film is a fact-based account of a former compulsive gambler from Toronto who, as a well-positioned senior banker with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, embezzled millions from his employer (CIBC then being the second largest bank in Canada) to feed his personal gambling habit at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
The story’s protagonist gambling-addict banker manages to ‘break’ a casino table thus win its entire funding (for the time being, anyhow) which is typically in the millions) yet could not peel himself away from the casino establishment until he had (frustratingly for me and no doubt many other viewers) lost everything he’d won as well as the mega-money with which he came to town. I’ve been informed that gambling addicts are known for this kind of defeatist behavior in order to (again subconsciously) feel justified in their post-large-monetary-loss self-flogging of their own psyches.