BettingPros must have put quit a few hours in to get certified to offer expert anal. But they’re clearly now Bona Fide now – says so right there in the DuckDuckGo search results. Hey – here’s a screenshot if you don’t believe me:
There’s a particular kind of joy available only when a search engine takes a respectable business, carefully reads its credentials, and introduces it to the public as “BettingPros — Free Sports Betting Picks, Odds & Expert Anal.”
Not amateur anal. Let’s establish that immediately. This is BettingPros. There are spreadsheets. At SportsIntensity, we’re very much still novices, but we have aspirations, by gum. We’ll get to the top like BettingPros someday – mark this post!
The phrase begins so sensibly. Free sports betting picks: yes, lovely. Odds: essential. Expert: reassuring. You are halfway through reaching for your reading glasses when the final word arrives and the entire enterprise requires a different set of curtains.
What makes it magnificent is the confidence. No exclamation mark. No coy little wink. Just three services, presented for your consideration with the brisk professionalism of a law firm. Picks. Odds. Expert Anal. Since ’69. Ask for Seymour Butts.
Somewhere behind that headline sits the innocent word “analysis,” waiting for its final four letters to clear security. Those letters are doing an extraordinary amount of reputational work. You would think a company could lose four letters without fundamentally changing its business model. Barclays could misplace half its vowels and still repossess your house. BettingPros loses “ysis” and suddenly the customer acquisition meeting becomes considerably more interesting.
And “expert” is precisely the right word to leave dangling there at the end. Had the result ended at “Expert,” we could all have gone home. A slightly incomplete sentence, sure, but no ard no foul. But the title extends just far enough to imply qualifications. Accreditation. A senior practitioner with eighteen years’ experience and a disconcertingly firm handshake.
The sports betting only improves it. This is an industry in which people already discuss getting hammered, taking a pounding, being exposed at the back and having an absolutely brutal Sunday. BettingPros isn’t exactly in uncharted territory here. They’ve simply made explicit what the man holding a three-leg parlay has been trying to communicate since the early days of the gymnasium.
I had to think about it though: “Free picks” ok. “Odds” Naturally. But the “Anal” gave me pause, I have to admit. It just felt overly ambitious for this weekend’s game. But hell, what do I know – I’m still just an amateur.
Meanwhile, the word “Free” hovers over the whole arrangement with wanton grammatical overreach. Does it apply to the picks alone? To the odds? To all three? Are there introductory terms? Yoiu know what they say: first taste is free. But this isn’t one of those ménages in which you find yourself discovering an unpleasant surprise in the fine print after going all… ahem … in.
Maybe BettingPros is “Picky” With Their Picks
Isn’t it wonderful how we – as a culture – have grown quite comfortable with anal these last few years. For a perfect of my meaningm, look to none other than tocday’s NYT mini crossword. Because crosswords should put all of us in mind of a retentive sphincter, no? (Did I just have a million dollar idea of “porn crosswords? Trademark! Can’t steal it – too late!)
So perhaps BettingPros offer expert anal in the sense that they can spend forty minutes explaining −108 was a better bet than −110. If that’s the case, then this makes sense. Because that‘s the kinda anal you want from your stats jockeys.
Or maybe… this wasn’t an accident at all. Maybe these expertly overly fussy BettingPros knew that dropping four letters would gain them an entirely new vertical. Cheap traffic anyone? I mean, it’s a strategy, I guess.
I particularly enjoy that the reader hasn’t sought any of this. They wanted odds. Their search gave them a BettingPros result that they’ll now need to explain to the dude sitting beside them. There is no elaborate joke to construct. The algorithm has done everything for us. A chaste enterprise, a sober commercial promise, a truncated title and an impertinent suggestion, the “ysis” stranded somewhere on the side of the results page, hastily buttoning its pants and checking its watch: should still be able to catch the end of that game…
