Calling Balatro a gambling game has become one of my pet peeves, because in essentiallity it's a series of math challenges. You try building poker hands, and the game does card counting for you so puzzle-to-puzzle probabilities are all laid bare. You get to influence statistics of the game in-between rounds, which is where the most random element of the equation comes from. I quite enjoy playing the long game, thinning out and refiguring the deck for my playstyle. Where the game loses me is in HOW you are supposed to win the run. Rather than interesting cardomancy, the way to progress through is to stack payouts, mutipliers and multipliers on top of multipliers until the actual card game requires nothing but non-commital hands. The middle is the most interesting of any run where you form a game plan and look to implement it with tools thrown in your way. But the end result you seek? To make the line go up until your input doesn't matter. And that's just hella dull.