Smarkets is public!
February 26, 2010
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
February 19, 2010
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
February 11, 2010
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
February 5, 2010
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
February 3, 2010
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
February 2, 2010
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.
