College football is 6 weeks away.

In other words, 6 weeks from tonight, there will be  a multiple college football game games on television.

And I will have a bet on at least one. Probably more than one.

Yeah, there will be NFL preseason games before then, plus Abilene Christian on CSTV one week before the big boys start, but you have to be really really degenerate to bet on that crap (puh-leeze). I’m talking about the real first day of the season. The first gambling day.

Here are the “real” games for September 3:

Anyone care to make a guess at what the spreads will be? If you do, write it in the comments and I’ll send a (yet undetermined) prize to whoever does the best job.

Not too groundbreaking, but worth a post: another study that shows it still ain’t gambling:

The consulting firm that performed the study, Cigital, worked closely with PokerStars.com, which funded the study.  They utilized 103 million hands from PokerStars.  They only used real money cash games (no heads-up games) with blinds mostly over $1.

Of the hands they examined, slightly over three-quarters of them did not go to showdown.  That means that over 75% of the time, the best hand was not shown down.  With that in mind, it can be said that skill was utilized instead of pure chance.  That includes the skills of betting, being aggressive, and also knowing when to fold.

When there was a showdown, the study found that the best five-card hand actually won the pot only about half the time.  The other half of the time, what would have been the winning hand was actually folded prior to showdown.  This once again shows the amount of skill involved when players can get other players to fold better hands than them in order to win the pot.  All in all, the study showed that the true best hand only won about 12% of the time.

But we already knew that. One benefit that I have always attributed to online poker is the availability of data, both at the micro level (players) and at the macro level (studies like this).

This post is a test, really.