Smarkets Blog

We conducted a survey a few weeks ago and one of the top features you asked for was market depth. So we’ve built it!

Rather than over complicate our standard interface, at the top of every market you’ll see a link to ‘show market depth’. This will take you to a new, more advanced layout. The market depth view is a way of seeing exactly where the money is in the market so you can see exactly how much will be matched. We’ll be putting together a video to explain the market depth view in more detail once we’ve ironed out any kinks.

We’re showing three levels of depth for both bids and offers (‘for’ and ‘against’ in Smarkets terminology) and, differing from other market-based betting sites, we show the amount of money you need to place to match the bet. We’re also showing your profit and loss for each market so you can see exactly which positions you have and how much you’d stand to win/lose depending on different outcomes.

We hope you find this view useful and, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Currently in test, launching soon….

We asked a bunch of existing Smarkets members to complete a short feedback survey on how we’ve been doing. The results were really interesting. On the whole we’re going in the right direction and most of you are pleased with what we are doing. Many of you like our leaderboard and social features, but you also told us that we need to be spending time on our core product. We hear you.

We’re now focussing on market depth (we’ve sent some concepts to members to see what they think about what we’re planning) and we’re about to massively expand the number of events we cover and the number of markets within each event.

Our new bonus and refer-a-friend schemes have gone down well but we’re going to continue to experiment with the best scheme to attract members who actually want to bet rather than people who are only in it for the bonus!

Feedback is really important (I know every company says that, but we mean it!) so we’ll be running more surveys, emailing members with concepts and thoughts and conducting tests of new functionality. Please get in touch with us and let us know what we could be doing better.

And the lucky fellow to be picked out of the hat to win a £100 risk free bonus was Robert W. from London. Congratulations!

Exciting new feature time! I talked about the concept of ‘friends’ in the last post (a friend is a mutual follow relationship) and now it’s time to do something interesting with your friends. You now have a leaderboard on your profile page where you can compare your betting abilities between your friends. Awesome eh!

How does it work?

The Smarkets boffins put together a formula to calculate your score based on both your return on investment and the variety of markets you’ve successfully dabbled in over the last 30 days. We’ve designed it so you are comparing your predicting skills between your friends and not the amount of money you bet.

The leaderboard is then shown on your profile page with your current and best ever scores. Bragging rights abound!

Why are we doing it?

Well, we love comparing our winning streaks and best return between each other in the office and we wanted a way to do something similar between our friends. We’ll be extending the concept to create a leaderboard for all Smarkets members and we will be running competitions around custom leaderboards in the future. Find out who’s the ‘most accurate West Ham fan’ or the ‘most accurate bettor at Wimbledon’. But all that’s for the near future. At the moment it’s just a bit of fun between you and your friends.

Not keen on being on a leaderboard?

Don’t worry, you can opt out in your account settings and we only automatically added the people who already shared their visibility. So if you are set as ‘private’ we’ll never include you in new social features.

We’d love to hear what you think about features like this, so please get in touch either directly, or via the comments.

So you’ve probably noticed all those Facebook ‘like’ buttons appearing on Smarkets. Why are they important? Well, Facebook are doing something a little clever with them. They are putting together a social search engine which weights the results based on the web pages your friends ‘like’. So if you have Arsenal fans for friends (commiserations) when you ‘like’ our Arsenal matches, they’ll appear higher in your friends searches. All interesting stuff.

We’ve also tweaked the following concept a little so when two members follow each other they become ‘friends’. This extra-strength relationship means you have more control of who you share your data with and we can do some fun things like leader-boards and challenge-a-friend. The ‘followers’ concept still exists but your followers will just see your comments in their activity stream at the moment.

Lots more social stuff to come like sharing your winning streak, fan accuracy, and putting things on other sites such as Twitter and your blogs. Keep your eyes peeled for the updates and get in touch with us with feedback about what you think of all this social stuff.

* Graham Taylor would have clicked our ‘like’ buttons!

Smarkets is the only betting exchange to enable users to bet with their favourite odds format. We default to percentages, but users can switch to American, decimals or fractions. Yesterday we ran a query through our users to see which format was most popular.

From the users who have deposited money and placed a bet, 65% use percentages, 25% user decimals, 9% use fractions and not a single one uses American.

Interesting stuff. I’m running a poll on this blog on the right hand side for you to give your preference too.

I’m pleased to see percentages are popular as we think they make the most sense for new bettors. We also have an excellent new feature in the pipeline which works best with percentages!

We let you bet with the odds style of your choice (decimal, fractional, american or percentages) but we set the default display as percentages. The problem is that matching odds between these different display types can lead to some pretty strange percentage odds (such as 17.25%) which were impossible to match with our old slider interface.

In order to make each betting style fair we’ve updated the percentage betting interface. Dragging the slider still jumps in whole numbers but we’ve added an input box next to the slider so you can type in a fraction of a percentage.

We are thinking of changing our default display to a different style, and I’d be interested to hear what you think.

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.

We’ve made a pretty huge update this week. As Smarkets is all about simple, social betting we’ve carried out a complete overhaul of the profile and account pages to make it easier to find people and track your account activity.

Easy to Understand Accounting

We’ve always been frustrated by how complicated the account history is, on other websites so we’ve relaunched ours with the features we wanted to see. You now have a clear dashboard in your account which shows how much money you have in-play, what your potential winnings are, your balance and your profit and loss for the last 30 days.

We’ve also separated out all your bets by ‘active bets’ (that’s bets currently in-play), ‘settled bets’ (with handy colour coding so you can see at a glance if you won or lost), and ‘financial activity’. This last section shows you all the money that went in and our of your account.

For each match you bet on, we’ve grouped all the information together so you can see each position and the amount that was matched by other fans. You can also cancel unmatched bets directly from the account page. I’ll put together a video in the next few days explaining the new layout.

Check out the new account.

What’s your winning streak?

We’ve tidied up the profile page so you can now see which matches your friends comment on and see who’s following you. We’ve also added some personal stats such as your success rate, longest winning streak and your highest winning odds. Don’t worry though, these numbers are hidden from other members: they’re for your eyes only.

Check out your new profile.

We hope you enjoy these updates, but get in touch if you have any questions or problems.

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog recently, but that’s because we’ve been hard at work improving Smarkets. The latest releases saw some pretty big improvements all round, but in this post I’ll talk a little about the bet slip in particular.

Original bet slip

The bet slip (or widget) is the area on the right of the screen which displays the current status of the users matched and unmatched bets. The piece above the bet slip is called the user card and this is where we display the profile links, avatar and account balance. As you can see, the original user card was pretty hard to read.

The bets used to be grouped by ‘matched’ and ‘unmatched’ with the name of the bet and the amount remaining. A matched bet was where 100% of your stake had been matched by other Smarkets users, an unmatched bet was one where only part of your bet had been matched.

We knew the look and feel needed updating but, after some user testing (conducted on a laptop with rough mock-up prototypes in Omnigraffle), we came across a lot of confusion about what ‘matched’ and ‘unmatched’ bet actually meant. So we went back to the drawing board.

New bet slip!

First we reorganised the user card so the avatar was bigger and the account balance easier to read. Then we tidied up the betting slip with a new layout, removed some of the visual clutter and created cleaner headings. Rather than list the full team names in the match, we’re now showing a short code version of the team names to make it easier to scan.

We’ve also introduced new groupings. All your active bets are shown together at the top of the slip. If your bet isn’t fully matched by other Smarkets users then you’ll see the percentage matched in red. You can cancel unmatched bets with a little cross icon and if you’ve made bets at different odds then you’ll see a pop up window asking you which bet you want cancelled.

Rather than digging around account history pages to find out what happened to your settled bets, underneath your active bets we show your two most recently settled bets along with how much you won or lost.

These changes will make it a lot easier to see the state of your bets, but we’re always interested in your feedback so get in touch.