Bettin’ or Braggin’: Win some, lose some

Our standard disclaimer at Bettin’ or Braggin’ appears in every post. You can scroll down and read it yourself, or simply accept this abridged version: We have no idea what we’re doing.

We’re all life-long football fans, mind you, but newbie “gamblers.” We can plop down on our couch with the best of ’em, but when it comes to plopping down the SFBay bucks against the spread, well, your guess is usually as good as ours.

All this to backtrack and explain away my first “lock” pick of the season last week — Indianapolis over New England — a pick that looked decent for the first half, then combusted in the second half as New England powered to a 35-point win. Ouch.

But all was not lost, since big bets on San Francisco, New Orleans and Pittsburgh all paid for me. The Pittsburgh win came against picks for Baltimore from Ali T. and Chelena G.

Despite the big loss on the, ahem, “lock,” I managed to finish up 900 SFBay bucks. Ali pulled within 100 bucks of Chelena with a +500 buck week, while Chelena suffered a flesh-wound loss of just 100 bucks. SFBay reader ParksideGreg finished the week at 5900 SFBay bucks, his depleted stack suffering just a 200 buck loss.

This week, other than Oakland-Cincinnati, the lines are small and the games fairly tricky. I’ll let my bets speak for themselves this week. Enjoy the football!

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	13,500	+900
Chelena	9,400	-100
Ali	9,300	+500

Week 11

Game	Ali	Chelena	Jesse
San Francisco (-1) at New Orleans	NO 200	NO 200	SF 1200
Oakland at Cincinnati (-8)	CIN 200	CIN 100	CIN 400
Buffalo at Indianapolis (-3)	IND 500	IND 100	IND 2000
Green Bay at New York (N) (-3)	NY 200	GB 100	GB 300
Seattle (-3) at Miami	SEA 200	SEA 100	SEA 1000
St. Louis at Arizona (-1 1/2)	STL 200	ARI 100	STL 2000

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 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.