2. If a person with a gambling problem takes out a home equity loan and bets it all on black and wins, the most likely outcome is that they then keep betting until they eventually lose. So while one bet may have close to a 50% change of paying off, the real world expected value of giving someone $100k to go to a casino is much less than if you'd given that same $100k to a random person who wants to start a restaurant.

3. Opening a failed restaurant isn't something that someone is likely to do more than once. It's hard to find exact numbers, but the number of people who will ever start a failed restaurant is less than a tenth of a percent. The number of people who will experience a gambling disorder at some point in their life is 1-2%.

4. Even assuming a person does have some kind of problem and wants to keep trying and failing to open restaurants, the process of opening a restaurant takes a lot more time and effort than betting on roulette.