Bettin’ or Braggin: Girl Power

Just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Last week was the worst money week ever for Bettin’ or Braggin’, with our three heroes throwing more than 12,000 SFBay Bucks into the wind.

With Ali and myself losing large unwise bets, who else has taken the BoB lead but the slow-and-steady Chelena.

As we wind down the season, it’s still wide open. Ali and I have almost everything riding on this week. Bad weeks for either or both of us and Chelena is nearly guaranteed victory.

Enjoy the games and pick wisely.

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	6,400	-7,300
Ali	4,800	-4,500
Chelena	8,800	-400

Week 15

Game	Ali	Chelena	Jesse
San Francisco at New England (-5 1/2)	NE 500	SF 100	SF 500
Kansas City at Oakland (-3)	OAK 500	OAK 100	KC 500
Detroit (-6 1/2) at Arizona	DET 500	DET 100	DET 4000
Green Bay (-3) at Chicago	GB 500	GB 100	GB 500
Tampa Bay at New Orleans (-3 1/2)	NO 1000	NO 200	TB 500
Pittsburgh (-1 1/2) at Dallas	PIT 1000	PIT 200	PIT 500

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.