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What: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Where: HBO

When: Tonight, 10-11 p.m.

If you are intrigued by sports betting on the Internet, don’t miss this edition of HBO’s outstanding investigative magazine show. A segment called “Point, Click and Bet,” reported by Jim Lampley and produced by Matt Maranz, is investigative reporting at its best.

The report focuses on an offshore betting outfit, World Sports Exchange, located on the Caribbean island of Antigua. It was founded by Haden Ware, a 23-year-old college dropout, and Steve Schillinger, 45, a former stockbroker who says sports betting is more interesting than trading securities and commodities. They’ve hit on a get-rich-quick scheme, with a hitch. The federal government is trying to put them out of business and they could face prosecution if they return to the United States. “They’re trapped in paradise,” Lampley says.

Gyneth McAllister, Antigua’s assistant prime minister for gaming, tells Lampley that Ware and Schillinger will never be extradited and that her country should be allowed to establish its own laws.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who recently introduced legislation to ban all forms of Internet betting, calls it the “crack cocaine of gambling” and a business “where little Johnny can basically bet away mom’s entire credit card before she gets home from work.”

Maybe the most fascinating part of the segment shows an unidentified man saying he won $35,000 in six days from an outfit called “21st Century Sports,” which claimed to operate on the island of Aruba off Venezuela and never paid off. Lampley went to Aruba searching for “21st Century Sports” and learned it is nothing more than an illegal bookie operating in Bethlehem, Pa.

The other segments on the show are also good. The topics:

* NFL assistant coaches, underpaid and overworked, and their battle to lower the age to qualify for retirement benefits.

* The criminal element in the NFL and how rapists, wife beaters and drug abusers go undisciplined by the league. “The league has never suspended anybody or banned anybody for violence off the field,” says new HBO correspondent Bernard Goldberg.

* ‘Da Bears, the 1985 Chicago Bears of Mike Ditka, Jim McMahon and Buddy Ryan fame. “There will never be a group of guys like that,” says kicker Kevin Butler, and the segment backs up that statement.