Every game is built so the house keeps a slice of every dollar bet. That slice is called the house edge. Pick an amount below and see, in plain dollars, what each game costs you on average. Same money, wildly different price tags.
How much are you wagering? (total bet, over and over, until it has all cycled through the game)
109×
The game you pick matters more than luck. Wagering $100 on the lottery loses about $50 on average. Wagering the same $100 at a good video poker machine loses about 46 cents. The lottery costs roughly 109 times more for the same action.
Now the flip side: what if you invested it?
Say instead of wagering $100 once, you put that same amount in every month for 30 years, invested at the market average of 10.5% a year. Meanwhile a gambler wagering that amount every month in the average slot machine (7% edge) is handing the casino a cut every single month.
You put in (30 years)
$36,000
Invested at 10.5%, it becomes
$0
Same habit at the slots loses
$0
Honest note on the gambling math: these averages assume you wager the amount shown in total. In real play you re-bet your winnings, so the same bankroll cycles through the house edge again and again, and real losses usually pile up faster than the simple average suggests. Short sessions can still win. The edge only guarantees who wins over thousands of bets, and it is never the player.