Here a few characteristics of what helps give a sport a positive gamblebility rate:

Point Spread: You have to look no further than football to see how vitally important point spread is to the popularity of a sport. The difference of a single point favoured to a team can turn the sure confident bet of a 6.5 point favourite into a 7.5-point cold sweat. The point spread dares you to make a bet and creates drama around the finish of a game. Watching if a big favourite can cover the point spread is one of the main reasons people will sit through an opening round NCAA March Madness game that pits Duke against some school you've never heard of.

	Like Tiki Barber the NHL has dropped the ball.

Timing: A buddy of mine Dave brought up the idea that the NHL fails to pander to their true fan base by the timing of their schedule. The regular season ended this year on a Sunday night and the Playoffs started on a Wednesday night. "Why would they not end the season on a Wednesday or Thursday night and then start the playoffs on Saturday night? It would make it much easier to organize a playoff pool." The most popular and frenzied time for the NHL is playoff time. A time that even captures the Americans' attention and the NHL responds by dropping the ball like a Tiki Barber carry by planning a horrid schedule to start their playoffs. In contrast the NBA regular season ended on a Wednesday and was followed with a Saturday start date for the playoffs. Not only is it smart TV planning but it helps out NBA junkies who like to participate in pools.

Format: The NCAA Basketball tournament trumps other playoff systems because of the allure of its 64-team tournament format. Filling out your bracket has become a staple of office pools all over North America even though many people don't follow NCAA hoops during the year. Only the fun of bracketology can make people actually care about a Memphis - S. Carolina game. The huge success of the March Madness tourney has given rise to similar ideas like the Accenture Match Play Championship. This year's March Madness tourney produced about $85 million (USD) in legal Nevada wagering or about $5 million more than the Super Bowl raked in. So it's no wonder that the golf followed suit and developed their own field of 64 tournament that sees the likes of Tiger Woods and Mike Weir playing the role of no. 1 seed in their respective brackets.

Declared Winner: The most popular sports to bet on are those where there is a winner and loser decided. For gamblers, ties are like a coffee addict who hasn't received their daily java injection. You want to avoid them at all costs. Hockey and football are the only major North American sports where ties are allowed. The odd time you'll get a tie in football but the fans are still stoked about seeing it because of the extreme rarity of it happening. The NFL has had 1 tie in the past 5 years and only 16 in NFL history. Hockey meanwhile had 340 ties this year, which works out to be 14% of all NHL games ending up in a tie. You know the old saying about ties: "A tie is like kissing your sister." Well I guess the NHL has a full-blown case of incest on their hands. The NHL has tried remedying the problem by moving to 4-on-4 play in overtime as well as awarding teams an extra point for an OT loss, but the solutions have simply made a small dent in the big problem. The ultimate way for the NHL to deal with ties is to eliminate them all together by way of a shootout. Continue with a 5-minute OT period and proceed with a five-aside shootout if the game is still undecided.

Match-ups: Baseball is hardly what I would call an intriguing sport to follow simply because of the 162 game schedule that produces countless meaningless games throughout the season. The saving grace for baseball in terms of betting is the terrific match-ups a certain game can produce. You ever notice that the first thing always mentioned with a baseball game is the pitching match-up? Pitching makes such a difference and creates unique betting opportunities. For instance seeing that Roy Halladay is pitching instead of Pat Hentgen makes a huge difference. Boxing is another sport that is widely popular amongst bettors and it's purely on the basis of interesting matchp-ups, although I'm not sure you can use the word interesting and John Ruiz in the same sentence. There's a reason why they call Ruiz 'The Quiet Man' because none of his fights create discussion, simply boredom.

A 2003 study by the Christiansen Capital Advisors once again reiterates why hockey struggles to find a strong market in the U.S. The study shows that betting on hockey ranks last among team sports and that bets on hockey represent only about 20% of the bets the NFL generates or even about 25% of the bets that College football generate. It's not a coincidence that hockey also has the lowest gamblebility rate based on the aforementioned characteristics of appealing sports to wager on. Don't get me wrong, I think hockey is an excellent sport that simply goes unappreciated by those unwilling to give it a chance; it just fails to deliver as a great sport to bet on. And if you think that the correlation of gambling and the popularity of a sport don't go hand in hand then ask yourself next time why you're white knuckled about the finish of a Cincinnati Bengals - Minnesota Vikings game in the middle of November.