Yes, except the casino doesn't come with health insurance or other benefits.
I think part of it is the allure that the money has been "won" instead of "earned". You are "beating the system", or "sticking it to the Man"... I can't think of why else you'd subject yourself to this un-ergonomic work environment.
It also doesn't come with pager duty, stack ranking, working weekends, working long hours during the week, meetings, constant rush to meet deadlines, bad managers, bad coworkers.
For people who just want to earn a living and go home it doesn't sound too bad.
There's plenty of other benefits to it. You get to be your own boss, you don't need any qualifications, and being a professional gambler does have a kind of "sex appeal".
It's very pleasant to have 0 dependence on anybody or anything other than these games. You go in whenever you want, do your thing, and at the end of the day you have earned or lost money. It feels something like a microcosm of a purely merit based capitalism.
But the major downside is the lack of creation. I enjoy construction as well as software development for the same reason. At the end of the day (or year perhaps...) you can see something, that did not exist before, that you have created. That just feels really good. In gaming, you can make plenty of money but you aren't really creating anything and so it ends up feeling quite empty - especially when variance is doing its thing.
Second hand smokers need not apply, first hand is what it takes to succeed. He also gets the ability to walk away whenever he needs a break, for as long as he wants. He has a captive audience who has to listen to his latest feelings on Obama or Big Foot. And a surprisingly amount of random encounters that result in sex.
He used to drive taxi, then Uber for about the same take home. But what really makes him stay with video poker is the free gifts from the Casio (swag mostly), and the ~ 100 senior citizen ladies he romantically encounters each year.
I think part of it is the allure that the money has been "won" instead of "earned". You are "beating the system", or "sticking it to the Man"... I can't think of why else you'd subject yourself to this un-ergonomic work environment.