Smarkets Blog

It’s already the second week of the 2010/2011 Premiership and after an array of wild predictions at Smarkets Towers last weekend, the team have tried their hand at tipping this week for undisputed bragging rights.

Each of the team were given 10 units, and assigned them to any Premiership game they wanted. The return is then calculated based on the current odds (we’re showing it in decimal here)

Jason and Scott have gone for a straightforward approach, with Jason risking his entire bankroll on the Man Utd game, which is fairly safe but will only earn him 6.61 units profit. Scott decided to hedge his risk between Spurs and Aston Villa, for a greater return than Jason of 13.7 units.

Alex went for the emotional hedge against the Hammers, with bragging rights a consolation prize if West Ham lose.

Myself, Brad and Hunter have gone for a few teams to try and spread the risk. Brad has gone for the safer picks hence the lowest potential return of any of the team. Hunter has some controversial picks, with Newcastle and Stoke going against the majority of the team.

I went for where I feel there is value, even at a greater risk. Both Spurs and Aston Villa had superb opening games, and even though Tottenham had a bit of hiccup midweek in the Champions League I feel both teams have a good chance. West Ham were thrashed last week, so I’m hoping Bolton can nick a win while moral is down. Finally I went for Liverpool, as I wasn’t that impressed with City last week and I feel on our day Liverpool can have ‘em!

Russ decided to spread his units across all the favourites, which will earn him a idy 9.86 units if they all come in.

Jamie went for an interesting strategy of 2 of his units on long-shots to look for that big win, but covered him self with 8 of his units on sure bets.

We’ll see who arrives at work victorious on Monday…

The nominations for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize have been announced, listen to them on Spotify (with the links below) and then make your bet with us!

Dizzee Rascal – Tongue N’ Cheek
The xx – xx
Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation
Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea
Mumford and Sons – Sigh No More
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Foals – Total Life Forever
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
Biffy Clyro – Only Revolutions
Villagers – Becoming a Jackal
Kit Downes Trio – Golden
I Am Kloot – Sky at Night

Bet for who you think will win, or bet against the bands you hate!

A nice piece here from Fox TV (never thought I’d say that) on the wisdom of crowds and how prediction markets function.

The John Stossel show covered a bunch of other aspects of the American gambling industry in this six part series, all of which can be found on on www.midasoracle.org.

Walkers are running a competition to find the biggest fan of their new flavours. We loved the idea so we’re running a market on it, we also had a little taste test at Smarkets towers to see what the residents think.

We put the Northern Europe and Southern Europe flavours head-to-head. These were the results:

So the winner from this round, with a love/hate difference of +7 is German Bratwurst. The English didn’t even get a look in.

Our market still has the yet untasted American Cheeseburger in the lead, but we’ll see how German Bratwurst progresses in our taste tests!

We don’t often blow our own trumpet, but when Lindsey, an eagle eyed Smarkets member, spotted this tweet from Alastair Campbell:

It’s only took us 37 minutes to get the market live (we were a little slow because we were eating lunch!).

We’ve rolled out a little extra functionality on our political markets for any hackers out there. You can now get live prices for any of our political markets in either JSON or XML. For example:

The “overall majority” market as JSON is: http://api.smarkets.com/v1/markets/2gvp44k

Or the “Will the BNP win a seat” market in XML is: http://api.smarkets.com/v1/markets/2gvqip0.xml

Simply browse to any political market and view the source to see the link for that market. It’ll look something like this:

<link rel="alternate quotes"
    href="http://api.smarkets.com/v1/markets/2nktxr8"
    title="Clegg TV wins" type="application/json">
<link rel="alternate quotes"
    href="http://api.smarkets.com/v1/markets/2nktxr8.xml"
    title="Clegg TV wins" type="text/xml">

We have a much richer API in development so this is just a peek at the functionality to come. Have fun with our data, we’d love to see what you come up with. Let us know any feedback.

This is the first UK General Election where the three main party leaders are going head to head in a televised debate. Although criticised by some as reducing the campaign to a popularity contest, this style of debate has proved hugely popular in the US presidential elections.

On Thursday (televised on ITV) Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron will share the stage for the first of three debates and we’re offering markets on them.

Bet on the size of the TV viewing audience and on which leader will ‘win’ the most debates (according to ICM).

We’ve also introduced some new markets to our General Election betting such as the contested incumbents and the result of Morley & Outwood, the first of the constituency markets.

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.

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.

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.