A recent move by the Colorado legislature brought to mind a recent unpleasant exchange.

In the legislature, Senate Bill 131 limits customers to six deposits within a 24‑hour period and bans the use of credit cards to fund betting accounts. It also prohibits sports‑betting companies from targeting anyone under 21 and from sending push notifications or text messages that solicit bets or deposits.

I’m usually not a fan of nanny state measures or a fan of the Colorado legislature. The first says “you’re too stupid to make what we think are the right decisions.” This coming from a group of people who almost never make the right decisions. Their obsession with turning Colorado into Eastern California is repugnant.

But this latest measure makes sense. People under 21 are far more likely to make poor decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. Actually, studies say the brain isn’t fully formed until the age of 25, but you’d never get that age limitation passed. Many of our legislators rely on those poor decisions to get themselves elected.

Now on to the unpleasant exchange.

A reader took umbrage with one of my columns and sent a harsh letter informing me just how wrong my viewpoint was. I get such letters fairly regularly. When I simply said I disagree, she took to insults. She attacked my intelligence and integrity.

Then she dropped what she thought was a “gotcha” that would send me into a spiral of despair. She said that since I wrote often about sports, I must be a degenerate gambler.

Instead of a spiral of despair, it turned into a carousel of fun. I have shared the exchange (without naming her) with people who know me well and it never fails to get a laugh.

I don’t gamble because I don’t like to lose. If I’m going to drop $100, I’d rather do it by taking the family to dinner. The entertainment value of gambling never was enough to offset the feeling of waste that losing brings. I never got the gambling fever.

I’ve know people who do. A lawyer friend of mine got it bad one weekend and took a loss he still regrets. I have some relatives who get “the fever.” My father was one of those.

No, I write about sports because I was previously an athlete, a coach, an administrator in a college athletic department, a sports writer and a sports editor. It’s certainly not because a gambling addiction.

But that love of sports got me involved in gambling in an indirect way. As a teenager, I was involved with sports on multiple levels. Not only did I participate, but I also wrote about it for the Broomfield Enterprise. I read every sports magazine I could get. I watched games with a critical eye.

I knew so much about sports that, every weekend, my dad would hand me a sheet with all of the current point spreads. He would have me make the picks and he would place the bets. Sometimes, he would figure that I was unlucky this week and bet against all of my picks. It sucked when I’d pick more games right than wrong and dad was mad because he bet against me.

I continued to pick games for years because it was fun. I would more often match strengths against weaknesses rather than team against team. Sometimes, I would get a feel for a team. One year, I was 10-2 when picking games in which Bowling Green played. Another year, it was Hawaii. I was always good at picking Air Force games.

You could also get an advantage by picking against regional teams. The goal of the sports book is to get the exact same amount of money on each side of the bet. That way, they can scoop the VIG (in those day you’d have to bet $110 to win $100, with that extra 10% being the VIG). If the house got equal play on both sides, they’d make an easy 10% without taking any risk.

So the point spreads weren’t designed to predict the outcome of the game. They were designed to predict the behavior of the bettors. In Vegas, Californians filled many of the casinos every weekend. Since they often bet their favorite teams, the point spreads were skewed toward West Coast teams. I got a lot of picks right by going against California teams. When picking on the Atlantic City line, it was advantageous to pick against East Coast teams.

In this era of online betting, I’m sure those advantages no longer apply.

At my peak, I was correctly picking 62.5% of the games, which is a percentage that even professional gamblers would envy. I was often asked by those who gamble why I never bet the games. My response was always that I wasn’t certain I would pick them the same way if I had money on the line. A gambler understands that reasoning.

But the real reason was different. I didn’t want to risk those dinners with my family.