'When I was a child, I thought it was all fun and games'

Marina Benjamin spent two years in her 20s as a professional gambler after she was recruited by a team. She said she joined for the sense of adventure, but looking back, she realizes what the experience really did was help her understand her father, whose own gambling obsession may have crossed over into addiction.

Growing up, her father's love for gambling affected their family life. While on vacation the family would often stop at casinos.

"I thought the casino was this glamorous world of adult activity and I never thought that it was an addiction or an obsession or anything more serious than an entertainment," Marina said.

"It wasn't enough for me to have an understanding of it, a mental concept of it. I felt like I had to put myself in his shoes. I felt like I had to do what he did in order understand what made him work, and so I had to become a gambler."

While a professional gambler, Marina says it was cold, mathematical reasoning that got the win — not luck or chance. It was an intense schedule. She would start her day whenever the casinos opened. In Europe, casinos typically operated from 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. But in Las Vegas, they ran 24 hours a day. There was also limited time for bathroom and food breaks, but she kept up the career for two years.

"I think if you're not a gambler, you're not going to get sucked into it. I mean, I honestly didn't feel any compulsion to put my own money on the table. I played with the team's money — I was hired by a team, I was trained by a team — and it was their money that was going on the table."

Through her work, she says she got some insight into her father.

"I learnt that it was very far from being the fun, exciting personality quirk that he wanted it to be seen as, and that indeed that he was gregarious and adventurous and risky, but to me it seemed the absolute opposite — it seemed quite pathetic really in the most genuine sense of the word. It was full of pathos," Marina said.

Marina didn't tell her father she was gambling professionally.

"I didn't want him to think that there was any similarity between what he did and what I was doing. For all sorts of complicated reasons — I just wanted to draw a really clear line between us, and I felt that if I told him, that line would be blurred," she said.

She also said it might have, in part, been a test — "to see if there was any seed of addiction in me."