Smarkets picked in the Plugg Top 20 European start-ups
We’re excited to announce we’ll be in Brussels presenting at the Plugg Start-Ups Rally. Plugg is a pan-European conference for startups organised by TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters.
Out of the 116 companies submitted, we made the Top 20 selection. The top three startups will appear in the finals to vie for the Plugg Start-Up of the Year Award. Check out the list of other start-ups.
We will be pitching to the esteemed jury and audience on Thursday March 11th. Check out the schedule and if you are going to attend, make sure you come and say hello.
More Friends, More Money!
Refer a friend to Smarkets using your code and whenever they win a bet, you receive 50% of the commission.
You’ll see a new ‘refer-a-friend‘ link on your profile page with your referral code. You can send email directly from that page or copy and paste the link into Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or wherever your friends are! There is no limit to the number of referrals you can make and the bonus money will be awarded for 6 months from the day your friend signs up.
The bonus works like this: if your friend wins £100 on a bet, then the Smarkets commission would usually be £5, but as you referred them, we’ll split the commission and pay £2.50 into your account to bet with. The more they win, the more you win! You don’t need to do anything, the money will be paid into your account on a weekly basis.
Check out the full Terms and Conditions and if you have any questions, get in touch.
Start referring your friends to Smarkets. More friends, more money!
Smarkets is public!
Yes, it’s true, we’re out of private beta and open to users.
We’ve quietly rolled out a few fixes and improvements today, and next week we’ll be introducing invite codes and a referral scheme. Exciting times. So, sign up for Smarkets.
Trade using your favourite odds format
We’re pretty sure this is a industry first: Smarkets now allows you to set your own odds in the format of your choice.
There are very few betting exchanges, and the ones that we know of only allow you to bet with their house format. Betfair, for example, only allows you to use decimals. We’ve now released an update which allows you to trade using either percentages, decimals, American style or fractions.
This has been a big piece of work which involved changes across our entire system. We’ve not only updated the event and list pages, we’ve also updated the betting interface to make betting with each system as simple as possible.
Percentages still has the slider (but a better looking one!), fractions has drop down menus for each value, we’ve created a custom input box for decimal (for users familiar with the Betfair interface) and American has an input box. You can switch between formats with the ‘odds’ link at the top of every page.
Our odds explained page can give you more information on odds formats if you need it. I hope you find the new odds switcher useful. Please get in touch with any feedback.
Smarkets Commit Visualisation
Not to be outdone by the Twitter engineering department, we ran Codeswarm through our own Git repository.
The video shows Git commits to the Smarkets website over time. Each blob is a piece of code committed to the codebase. Backend (blue) is an Erlang application, Frontend (pink) is a Django application, and Middleware (white) is a collection of Python scripts.
How betting exchanges work
In this video we go into a bit more detail about how betting exchanges work. There are some slightly complicated concepts in here, but they’ll help you understand how to profit on Smarkets.
There’s more information on greening up in the Smarkets help section.
The difference between a bookies and betting exchange
Ever wondered what the difference was between a high-street bookmaker and a betting exchange? This video explains what we see as the main advantages of market betting.
A lesson in Tennis trading
I stumbled across this post on the Bet Angel Blog. It’s a great illustration of how market trading works, and the risk of relying purely on data to predict an outcome.
In the quarter-finals of the recent Australian Open, Roger Federer lost 13 games on the trot to Nikolay Davydenko resulting in his odds to win at Betfair lengthening from 1.3 to around 3.7. He took a break and returned to court a changed man, beating Davydenko with relative ease.
[In a post match interview] Federer commented on how the sun was bothering him and how he couldn’t wait till it had cleared the court. He also, accidentally, revealed how he timed his ‘comfort break’ to allow him a chance to regain his thoughts and break the stride of his opponent.
If you had just been following the score, it’s unlikely you’d have taken such an outside bet on Federer, but if you could tell that the sun was bothering him, you would have made a tidy £27 profit on a £10 bet.
Placing your first bet with Smarkets
Placing on a bet on Smarkets couldn’t be easier, but we’ve put a little video together explaining the process. Get betting!
Get your mitts on a Free Tenner!
Simple one this, make a deposit over £10 and we’ll give you a free tenner.
No tricks, no codes or special links. You make the deposit and we give you the free money! What are you waiting for? Get betting!
The offer ends January 31st. T&Cs here.
