Smarkets Blog

As it has been six months since our last Open House event we feel it is time to throw open our doors once again for another evening with our customers. We would like to invite all of our customers to join us in our London offices on Thursday 30th May for pizza, drinks and conversation. Our Open house events have been an enjoyable success in the past and offer the chance for users to meet old and new members of the Smarkets team as well as other customers. Those attending will also be able share their own personal feedback regarding the website and we’d be happy to answer any questions you may wish to ask throughout the evening. Details for the event are as follows:

Date – Thursday 30th May 2013

Time – 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Address – Smarkets HQ,

Royal London House, 4th Floor North,

22-25 Finsbury Square,

London,

EC2A 1DX

RSVP – To confirm your attendance or if you have any queries please contact daniel.tervit@smarkets.com

We all look forward to seeing you,

The Smarkets Team

Last night, the Smarkets site was down for over eight hours on a busy weekday betting night. This is an unacceptable level of downtime; we’re massively sorry, and we owe our customers a thorough explanation.

The problem arose around 18:30 UTC on Wednesday night, when our system started having issues accepting bets. We traced the issue to our exchange backend and attempted to restart it, however this revealed another issue. Our custom exchange software, written in the Erlang programming language, uses the Mnesia database to store some of its data. Mnesia has a limit of 2GB on the size of a table, and one of our tables picked this moment to exceed the limit, resulting in data corruption.

We had a fix for this oversized table ready to deploy, and we attempted to release it on Wednesday morning, but this release was delayed until Thursday because of a minor issue with our deployment system. We weren’t monitoring the size of this table, and we were caught out.

The bulk of the downtime period was spent attempting to reconstruct and restore this database. Data about all bets placed on Smarkets is stored in multiple places within our system, as well as being continually backed up off-site, so no information was lost. However, reconstruction of the database was a painstaking process and we weren’t happy with it until after 03:00 this morning, when our team finally went to bed.

A few accounts are still missing recent settlements, and we’re working on restoring these as quickly as possible. If you have any questions about your account history, please contact support and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

The root cause of this issue was a lack of knowledge of our backend systems within our team. We have a talented technical team but we’ve historically been lacking the staff to provide the levels of performance and reliability we aspire to. Our recent round of investment, announced today, will allow us to expand the size of our team and redouble our efforts to make Smarkets a fast and stable exchange platform.

Once again I’d like to offer my sincere apologies for letting you down last night, and I hope that our transparency will go some way towards restoring your confidence in Smarkets.

Just over a year ago we made an announcement introducing a set of payment fees that would allow us to continue offering 2% commission to every customer in as fair a way possible.

Part of our decision was that we would revisit this structure and revise it in accordance with customer behaviours and requirements. The general consensus is that the solution we arrived at was a good one . Our users still enjoy free deposits and withdrawals via debit cards and bank transfers while understanding that certain other methods have high transaction costs that we can’t absorb while maintaining our industry-leading low commission.

There is always room for improvement, and in this case that room is regarding Moneybookers/Skrill fees. Our current structure grants users free deposits up to free £/€500 each month, followed by a charge of 2.5% on any transactions over that amount. We’ve come to notice that this isn’t satisfactory for our most loyal Moneybookers users.

Because of this we have made the decision to lower the charge for Moneybookers deposits to 2% and to remove the £/€500 monthly amnesty altogether. While we realise that this will impact some of our lower-volume customers, we believe that this is a fairer way of passing on the high transaction costs for this method. These changes will come into force on Monday 18th February 2013.

As stated earlier, you can still make a deposit at no cost using your debit card or bank transfer, and we will not change this. If you have any comments, please give us your feedback either in the comments below or via an email to support@smarkets.com – we are always listening. Hopefully this time next year we’ll have continued our march against absurd deposit fees, and we’ll be able to announce an even fairer scheme.

There has been some confusion over the new accounts page on Smarkets, so we thought we’d write a short post outlining some of the features.

Filtering Bets:
Many of you have asked how you can filter your bets. If you look to the left of the screen, there is a filter section right at the top. Mousing over the line that reads ‘No Filters’ and clicking will open a drop down menu with a list of options you can filter by. Suppose you want to look at your deposits for the past 3 months. To do this, you would select the option that says ‘Deposits’ under ‘Transactions’. You would then change the time frame to reflect the past 3 months by using the drop down menu directly below (other options include: Today, Yesterday, Past 7 Days, Past Month, This Year and Last Year). Presto – you should now be able to view your deposits for the last 3 months.

If you’d like to remove filters, open up the drop down menu again and re-click on the filters you had added. They will disappear from the top section (it should read ‘No filters’ once you’ve de-selected them).

Commission:
Clicking the ‘Show commission’ box under the time frame menu will enable you to view your account history with commission or without.

Downloading Account History:
If you’d like to download an account history via CSV, you can do this by scrolling to the bottom of the accounts page. On the bottom left, there will be a link that says ‘Download as CSV’. Simply change the filters, time frame and select whether or not you would like commission shown, then hit ‘Download as CSV.’

Profit and Loss Flags:
We’ve added back the corner flags on Settled markets – if you were in profit for any given market, the line reading ‘Market settled’ will be flagged with a green triangle. If you lost on a market, it will be flagged with a red triangle.

Edit Unmatched Bets:
Although it’s not directly related to the accounts page, we also added an ‘edit your bets’ function. If you look at the list of your unmatched bets, you’ll see 3 columns: Stake, Odds and Status. Next to them you’ll see an option to ‘Edit’. If you click on that you’ll be able to change the price and/or how much you’d like to bet.

Hope this helps – if you have any questions, email us at support@smarkets.com

Smarkets is excited to announce the launch of a brand new online betting experience. Our new site offers a cleaner interface, faster navigation, improved search functionality, better filters for seeing your bets and a support chat box on every page, among other things.

Easier Navigation:
Sports are listed across the top and have simple drop-down menus, allowing for greater ease of navigation. Horse racing events are listed in order of upcoming race. Football events are sorted by continent and then alphabetically by league or type. We hope this feature will help you find the match you’re looking for more quickly.

Improved Search:
We’ve worked hard to improve the search functionality. Typing in a team or country will show you a list of upcoming matches. We’ve also increased the speed at which results are returned and eliminated old events from showing up in the list.

Bet from Search:
If you’ve found what you’re looking for and are happy with the price on display, you can place your bet without even leaving the page. It’s one example of how we’ve tried to speed up your betting experience.

Upcoming and Popular Events:
The logged in homepage shows upcoming horse races and football matches and the current top markets. Clicking on a market will take you through it, but you’ll notice that when you are on any given market, a list of the most popular events at that time are displayed to your right, just below your account history. We hope this will make it easier for you to click through to the events that most people are betting on.

Active Bets section on the right:
Previously you could only see your active bets and settled bets. We’ve added a filter to this section that will allow you to see any of the following:

-Bets for displayed markets
-All active bets
-Unmatched bets
-For bets
-Against bets
-Partially matched bets
-Recently settled bets

Support Chat Throughout the Site:
Want to get in touch with us about a market? No need to leave the page. Look to your bottom left – see that blue bar? Click on it and someone will be there to answer your questions. In the event that we haven’t got someone around (we do need to sleep sometimes), simply send an email to support@smarkets.com and we’ll get back to you.

Account History, Settings, Deposits, Withdrawals and Limits:
We’ve streamlined administrative and payment features into one drop down menu, in the top left. Want to set a limit on how much you deposit each week? Click on ‘Limits’ and enter an amount. Want to change your email address? Click on ‘Settings’ and do it there. You can also deposit and withdraw from this menu, and see your account history.

We know it’s sometimes hard to change but we think you’ll find the new site an improvement over the old one. As always, we welcome feedback, so chat with us on the site or send us your thoughts: support@smarkets.com