Balatro doesn’t have anything like gambling. There’s no betting. You don’t even have an opponent. The chips are only points, and the goal is to get as high a score as you can. The rules vary wildly from poker in ways that could never work with multiple players, let alone with real cards. It just looks like poker at the start and that description helps give you an initial idea of how to play.

It works pretty well, and that was without customising the controls. You definitely feel the limitations when doing some more complicated things like wire layouts for circuits, but it can be done. When I later played the Exotic Industries mod, then it felt like it wasn’t quite enough (configuring radial menus helped though).

I played a whole run of the base game without mods on my Steam Deck in handheld mode and found it just fine. It uses the extra buttons on the back quite effectively.