It's sort of like that old pigeon experiment, says the Gambler; that one where the birds press a button with their beaks to get a morsel of food. When the rewards come consistently, the pigeons only press the buttons now and then. When the rewards are random, the birds can't leave the buttons alone. They'll press those buttons all day.

He's talking about pigeons but also about gambling, the way it can get under your skin.

Some people can gamble just a little, the same way some people can drink one glass of wine, the Gambler says. And other people, whether they're winning or losing, just can't stop.

The first time he went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, he looked around the room at all the other gamblers — the sports bettors, the craps shooters, the video poker players — and he thought, "I'm not like these people." He hadn't lost everything, had he? And when the cocktail waitresses came around to his blackjack table, hadn't he ordered orange juice every time? Later he decided his smugness was just one more lie. He lied to himself, his wife, his church, his creditors, his employer.

There was a time when he would sneak away from his office two or three times a week, racing to Wendover to lay down some money on the blackjack tables. One time, early on, he nearly lost $10,000 in one night, then miraculously broke even.

"It was the worst thing that could happen," he says now. "I had dodged a semi-truck bearing down on me." Three years later, after taking out loans on his paychecks and the family van, his losses totaled nearly $20,000.

Therapy and his resolve to save his marriage are what saved him, he says. And the good thing about the blackjack tables, he says, is that they're 120 miles away. Internet gamblers don't have a desert between themselves and their computer, and shopaholics are tempted every time they go to the store. Maybe he's lucky after all.

On a recent evening he sat in a windowless room with seven other members of Gamblers Anonymous. As is the custom at GA meetings, they took turns reading from a pocket-size yellow pamphlet that includes the credo common to all "12-step" programs, and this definition: "Compulsive gambling is an illness, progressive in nature, which can never be cured, but can be arrested."

Some people in the substance abuse field, says Salt Lake addictionologist Dr. Michael Crookston, believe that calling gambling an addiction "cheapens the diagnosis of drug and alcohol addiction." Their feeling, he says, is that there have been decades of research legitimizing substance abuse as a disease, "and now everyone else wants to tag along."