You should always keep in mind when deciding what kind of gambling you're going to do what it's going to cost you per hour. This isn't a difficult calculation if you know how many bets per hour you're going to make, how big the bets are going to be, and what the casino's advantage is.
For example, if you're playing baccarat, you're probably going to play about 60 bets per hour. If you're betting $100 a bet, you're wagering $6000 per hour. Since the house edge if you're betting on the bank is only about 1.1%, you can expect to lose $66 or so per hour playing baccarat. $100 per bet X 60 bets X 1.1% house advantage = $66.
Blackjack played with perfect basic strategy reduces the house edge to about 0.5% under good playing conditions. You're probably looking at about 75 or so hands per hour, maybe more or less depending on how many people are at your table and how long they're taking to make their decisions. If you're playing at $5 a bet, you can play for an hour for a cost of only $1.88. That's a lot of action for your money, in my opinion.
Something else to keep in mind is that you're wanting to have fun. To have fun at gambling, you have to be playing for stakes that matter to you, but you cannot be playing for stakes that will break you. John Vorhaus talks about the gulp factor in a couple of his excellent books on poker. You should be playing for stakes that are high enough that you'd swallow hard if you just lost that much money one day and couldn't find it.
That amount might be $100 for you, and it might be $1000 for me.
The flip side to that is if you're playing for stakes that are too high, you're going to destroy your enjoyment of the game because you're so worried about being put in dire financial straits.
Also, if you're gambling online, you will usually be making more bets per hour than in a standard casino because of the speed of the software. I think there are now RTG casinos who deal 150 hands of blackjack per hour to you. THAT's going to change your hourly cost.
One last thing--if you play poker, you should be targeting an hourly earn rate. If you're playing poker, you should be playing to win, and tracking your results. A simple spreadsheet with three or four columns will enable you to track your hourly earn rate. But you'll need a lot of hours of records before you can be confident what your earn rate is.
