Saturday Best Bets, Friday Recaps
Friday was a long day in the Tuley’s Takes home office as we continued to get ready to send the kids back to college. And then it was a long night out of the office as we attended the “Big Check Ceremony” at the downtown D Hotel for Circa Sports Million and Circa Survivor and had a late dinner at Andiamo Steakhouse with last year’s Million champ Tony “DURBIFY” Gordon, last year Survivor winner Michael “MY COOL” Sax and fellow proxy Tom Carroll.
It was a fun celebration visiting again with a lot of the contestants we covered last weekend as they sweated out the final games of the NFL season, plus meeting new top finishers who weren’t here last weekend but came back to town to pick up their checks (both fake and real). My VSiN boss Bill Adee – and sidekick last weekend as we tag-teamed our coverage – did a great job of summing up the highlights of the Circa big-check ceremony in the VSiN newsletter:Overheard at the gathering: The 3 Denver guys who won the $100,000 booby prize for finishing last out of 4,000-plus in Circa Million said they didn't know they were dead last until the final week. They weren't trying for the prize; they just sucked at picking games. . . . And the team (JED) that won a share of the $6 million Circa Survivor contest started with 24 entries by having four guys buy 6 entries apiece. At one point, they forgot to enter the picks for 7 of their 9 remaining entries, leaving them with 2 for the rest of the way.
As for my own picks on Friday, I won my Best Bet on the Devils-Ducks 1P Over 1.5 -160/Oilers-Sharks 1P Over -175 in a parlay at +155 to more than make up for the loss on our first 1P Over parlay on Thursday.
My top NBA play of Suns +3 at the Timberwolves was a loss at that price, but they only lost 121-116 so hopefully followers were patient and got the +6.5 closing price or at least +6 or +5.5. We also mentioned the Clippers as a potential swagger play, but they went off as 5-point home favorites over the Nuggets and lost outright (proving once again why we use the “dog-or-pass” approach). Let’s get to the recap of Friday’s action and then look at Saturday’s menu. And then, as has become our custom around here, we’ll rerun our Wednesday column and update our “takes” on the NFL wild-card playoff games this weekend based on how the lines are moving.Friday Recaps