Woster: Don't you know? The house always wins.

I don’t understand the fascination people have with gambling.

I get that some people, maybe many of us, are taken with the idea of free money, whether a life-changing amount in a lottery jackpot or a couple of bucks in a round of golf. Who doesn’t want easy money?

That’s a far cry from blowing the rent money in a casino or losing the farm in a bet on a college basketball game. It’s light years from risking a professional football career, as five players recently did when it was discovered they violated the National Football League’s rules against gambling. Some of them have been suspended indefinitely.

You make a living playing a game and you need to gamble, presumably to make more money? That’s nuts. But then, I don’t understand the fascination with gambling.

I have gambled — in small ways. I was never comfortable with losing even a little money. Whenever I have made any wager, it has been to be sociable, not to win enough money to buy a yacht or a sports car.

Two high school friends sometimes talked me into betting a bottle of pop during a round of golf after school. Both my friends were much better golfers. I took the bet knowing I’d have to fork over, like, 25 cents to each of them. Usually, I tried to talk them out of betting with, “Let’s just play golf, shall we?’’

Once, when I worked in sports in Sioux Falls, I got paired with an older guy for a round of golf at Elmwood. After the first hole, he suggested we play for a dollar a hole. I guess he had analyzed my game and decided he had found a guppy. I declined and carried my clubs back to the parking lot.

During my college years, several of us on the top floor in Brown Hall played games of poker for match sticks. Kitchen matches, the wooden sticks with the red-friction heads, were the best, but we were OK with paper matches, too. In fact, paper matches were easier to get. In the days before people began to see that smoking had negative health effects, most bars, cafes and bowling alleys had books of matches in bowls near the cash registers, free for the taking.

I knew of some poker games in the dorm where players used real money. We didn’t do that. None of us were well-off enough to risk part of our savings from summer work or a part-time school job.

Even with match sticks, I could be bluffed into folding a pair of kings if the alternative was to stay in the game with someone who had just raised me five matches. “Too rich for my blood,’’ I would mutter.

Now and then I would play pool, sort of for money, at B & G Billiards on the main drag. The deal was, loser paid for the game. It should tell you all you need to know about my pool game when I say that everyone wanted to play me. I went in knowing how many games I was willing to pay for, and I stopped when I reached that number.

I have purchased exactly one lottery scratch-ticket in my life. For a news story, I played blackjack and a slot machine in Deadwood. I have never played video lottery. The house always wins.

I remember being shocked by the college basketball gambling scandal in the early 1960s. I was just trying to make the high school team. Guys from a couple of dozen colleges were throwing away scholarships by becoming involved in a gambling scheme.

A decade before that, a wide-spread gambling scandal had tainted college basketball. They called it point shaving, not throwing games. I didn’t see much difference, and I couldn’t understand why a player would get involved.

Betting on sports has always been a thing. A lot of money used to change hands during the high school basketball tournaments in South Dakota. Probably still does.

These days, sports betting is huge, and it is growing bigger. That seems nuts to me, nothing but trouble somewhere down the road. But, then, I don’t understand gambling.