Bettin’ or Braggin’: Raising the stakes

If you’re gonna go, go big. If you’re not gonna go, get out of the way.

Ten weeks into the pro football campaign, Ali T. has had enough of the nickel-and-diming. We like his style. But he knows that.

SFBay readers are still battling it out for the actual prizes. Cool stuff we can’t wait to give away. After a rocky couple of weeks, ParksideGreg has bounced back to lead the reader battle with 9,500 SFBay Bucks.

No whimsical prose this week. Just picks. Enjoy.

Fair warning: We’re not touts, sharks or bookies. We don’t splash action around the web or line up bets in back alleys. We’re just a few local writers picking games without much of a clue. So using these picks for your own gambling is probably a very bad idea.

Leaderboard

Name	Bankroll	Last week
Jesse	13,100	+400
Chelena	10,000	+200
Ali	9,300	+300

Week Ten

Game	Ali	Chelena	Jesse
St. Louis at San Francisco (-11)	SF 200	SF 200	SF 1500
Oakland at Baltimore (-7 1/2)	BAL 300	BAL 100	OAK 200
Buffalo at New England (-11)	NE 1000	NE 100	NE 1000
Denver (-4) at Carolina	DEN 400	CAR 100	DEN 1000
Dallas (-1 1/2) at Philadelphia	DAL 200	PHI 100	DAL 200
Houston at Chicago (-1)	CHI 200	CHI 100	HOU 1000

To refresh anyone’s memory on how point spreads function, the team with the “minus points” is the favored team, and has the “point spread” deducted from their score at the end of the game. The final score adjusted by the point spread determines the winner of the bet.

If a team is favored by three points, they must win by more than three points to win a point spread bet.

You Can Win!

Of course you can play along with Bettin’ or Braggin! What kind of pro football picking game would Bettin’ or Braggin’ be if you couldn’t play?

You can win prizes! (We can’t. All SFBay staff can win are bragging rights over each other. In other words, priceless.)

But first, some rules:

• You’ll need to to pick at least six of the 17 weeks of the pro football season to be eligible to win a prize.
• We will pick all San Francisco and Oakland games in the regular season. All other games selected are at the sole discretion of SFBay.
• You play the game by posting your picks to the pre-selected pro football games in the comment thread of the SFBay Bettin’ or Braggin’ post each week. Your pick should consist of a city and a dollar amount for all six games. All your picks must be posted in a single comment.
• The deadline for entering Bettin’ or Braggin’ is Sunday, September 30 at 11:59 p.m. The deadline for submitting your picks is 10 a.m. Sunday (Pacific Time) each week. We won’t be picking Thursday games because Thursday pro football is bullshit.*
• The winner is the player who ends up with the most SFBay Bucks at the end of the pro football regular season. Sorry, SFBay Bucks have absolutely no cash value or equivalent.

* – Actually, we will be picking two Thursday games, the Seattle-San Francisco game Oct. 26 and the Denver-Oakland game Dec. 6. On those weeks, the deadline for weekly picks will be Thursday at 5 p.m. See why we don’t like Thursday games? Too complicated.

Fabulous Prizes

Third-place: SFBay black fleece hoodie, high quality. Nice stuff. $50 value.

Second-place: Limited-edition, authentic SFBay Golden Gate FC soccer shirt, customized with your name. $120 value.

First place: A green Joe Montana Notre Dame Adidas jersey, “True School Authentics,” Size 56. Very high quality retro-authentic heavy mesh. Brand-new, never-worn condition. All tags attached. Very collectible. $250 value.