Gambling will create an emotional attachment, but not as an anchor. The game's not an anchor, the gambling's not, the rules aren't it's the players that are.
If Tiger Woods suddenly played pool the game would get a sudden impact of millions of viewers because of the person, not the game. Same thing if any professional superstar played the game, so we have to make these stars ourselves, much like Minnisota Fats, Paul Newman and Tom Cruise did.
When I was playing full time we did many charity events and I even played at the Pre Academy Awards party in LA hosted by Jody Foster and John Travolta. I was around a hundred or so movie and TV stars and many of them watched me play on the pool table. They had cues worth over 80k there on display and it was a fantastic promotional event for pool and the pool cues to celebrities.
How many charity events are currently being done before each Pro event? How many were just done at the US OPEN? How about any of them? The easiest way to get something in front of the public eye (in a great context) is through charity events.....and breast cancer would be the ideal one, it gets the biggest media exposure of any last time I checked (I did big charity events out of my billiard club, Carsons Palace in Dallas).
Anyway, without building recognizable characters in pool by presenting them to the public there's no hope for pool as a whole.....this can change quickly, but not without charity events and character building......never has, and never will.
It DOES NOT matter which pool game or how much the players are playing for.....a million dollar game would have no impact, it would be like the tree falling in the forest with no one around.....does it really make a sound? Neither will Pro Pool without a strong marketing/PR plan of attack. 'The Game is the Teacher'