Practice and experience makes you a better player. As far as comparing gambling to tournament play they can be as different as a sprinter and a long distance runner. Except for maybe round robin, most all tournament play is basically sudden death.
In tournament play a lot of things can make you lose but it's rarely because your dogged it. It sometimes just doesn't go your way, or you make a bad decision at some point maybe played safe when you probably should have went for it and so on.
Gambling has a lot of freedoms to it and most of what happens is within your control. That includes you saying to yourself the guys too good and quitting. Just cuz you're gambling nothing locks you into going broke. So in essence there really isn't that much pressure gambling. And in the same respect you can be losing, and you just got it in your heart that you know you can win if you just hang in there.
Tournament play also requires a certain amount of humility. I remember being at a tournament one time with Big Bob and he didn't often play in tournaments but he entered this one. He ends up playing a match with a guy who's not that good a player but Bob loses.
The guy Bob lost to it was a little bit arrogant and he and his friends were over there laughing it up and excited that he had won. Much out of Bob's character he walks over to the guy and says in front of all his friends would you like to play some for real now?
Of course the guy says no and Bob's probably could and would have given him the six ball so it was a silly thing to do but Bob was embarrassed. That's what can happen to you in tournaments, you can get embarrassed.
You better learn to just shake hands and say good game and that's that.
