You gotta have money to make money. So for those of us who don’t have any, let’s take that part out of the equation and pretend we’re all millionaires with all our bills paid off. Now who are you going to bet on?

For me, this big mound of cash is an opportunity to specialize in my favorite betting sport, which happens to be the NBA. I’d be all over that sport like white on rice. I’d go to see as many games in person as possible. I’d hire a personal trainer and play and learn and play some more – in my case, it would have to be point guard, since you can’t learn height.

Armed with this cultivated appreciation for the game, I’d be even better able to identify undervalued point guards like Daniel Gibson and overvalued players like Jason Kidd. And then the next million in earnings comes rolling in. Time to give baseball a try…

Blackjack is the best game on which to bet your bottom dollar. If you’re down to one bet, the blackjack table is usually where you’ll get the best odds to double it. If you bet on a sporting event or a horse race, you’ll need a successful long shot to occur to double that dollar. It would be stupid to bring a dollar to a poker game, and other table games all carry a bigger house edge than blackjack. You could play the penny slots, but you’ll still need a long shot to make some money.

There are a couple of bets that offer just as good odds as the blackjack bet, but on the blackjack table you also have a chance to win 3-2 if you hit a natural blackjack. There’s at least a degree if skill involved on betting your bottom dollar on blackjack; the other options leave everything up to fate.

Pebble Beach Golf Links is a public course – provided you’re the kind of public that can afford to spend $500 on a round of golf. Steve Lowery can afford to go there as often as he wants after winning the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am over the weekend. Lowery took the first hole of a sudden-death playoff with Vijay Singh to pick up his first PGA Tour victory in over seven years. His prize: $1.08 million and a two-year Tour exemption.

Lowery was still part of the futures “field” at press time for both the 2008 Masters and the British Open, as you might expect from the No. 305-ranked player in the world. That ranking is bound to go up after Sunday’s results. But it did take a collapse from Singh: three bogeys on 14-15-16 to fall into a playoff with Lowery. Singh was 25-1 Sunday night to win the Masters and 33-1 for the British Open.

With all the hubbub over the Pau Gasol deal, this week might be a good time to check out the NBA championship futures market and slip a quick buck on – the Dallas Mavericks.

While the Lakers are drooling over what could be a title-worthy team (assuming Andrew Bynum is healthy soon enough), the Mavericks have been considering bringing the prodigal Jason Kidd back to Big D. A rumored deal has Devin Harris and Jerry Stackhouse on the move; the problem will be to get a third team (Portland is frequently mentioned in these rumors) involved in a multi-player shuffle for salary-cap purposes.

Harris (18.65 Player Efficiency Rating) has actually outplayed Kidd (15.97 PER) this season, but Kidd has the veteran leadership and can be expected to have a sudden improvement in performance once he leaves New Jersey, as Vince Carter did when he arrived from Toronto. Kidd, Dirk Nowitzki and Josh Howard? Smells like a championship.