Smarkets Blog

The 97th Tour de France rolls out of Rotterdam on July 3rd for 3,642km of racing over 20 stages and Smarkets is offering a plethora bets on the event.

Alongside the general classification, team and jersey winners, we’re also offering markets on head-to-head battles such as Cav vs. Tyler Farrar and Basso vs. Cadel. And, even though England are out of the World Cup, you can still support the Brits with Bradley Wiggins a contender for yellow and Mark Cavendish trying to finish in green. With eight Brits starting the Tour, we have a unique ‘Battle of the Brits‘ market to predict who will finish highest on the GC.

It promises to be an exciting tour this year with Lance hoping to retire with a bang and Cadel Evans and Ivan Basso turning into legitimate competition for Contador. As the race progresses we plan to add stage winner markets and bets unique to Smarkets.

Following close on the heels of our General Election markets, we’re pleased to announce that you can now bet on Formula One. We’re covering season long bets such as the drivers’ champion and constructors’ championship as well as head-to-head markets between team mates like Jenson Button vs Lewis Hamilton or Alonso vs Massa.

The Malaysian Grand Prix takes place this weekend and we’re offering markets on many aspects of the race. Both the qualifying sessions and race will be shown on BBC One so you can bet while you’re watching TV. Sounds like a cracking way to spend a Sunday morning. Hopefully there’ll be better weather conditions than there were in Australia…

Get a free tenner!

To celebrate the new F1 season, if you’ve never deposited into your Smarkets account before then now is the time. We’re offering a free tenner for the first one hundred members who make their first deposit. Why not have a flutter on the Grand Prix with some free money?

Make a deposit, get a free tenner.

Pretty impressive predictions all round. Andy Gray only predicted four matches, but he got all the results correct. Lawro got one wrong, but he did predict the correct score for the Sunderland v Man City game. Huw also got one wrong, but he doesn’t make correct score predictions.

Next week I think I’ll pay a little more attention to the pundits, maybe they do know what they’re talking about!

There are a tonne of games this weekend across all the leagues, so if you are having trouble seeing the wood for the trees, this is how the pundits (BBC’s Mark Lawrenson, Betfair’s Andy Gray and FourFourTwo.com’s Huw Davies) think the Premiership matches will end up.

Lawro’s predictions have been pretty solid in the past so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Nobody backing my beloved West Ham to beat Chelsea then… strange.

We’ve battled through the snow and made it to Smarkets Towers to release some brand new markets. You can now bet on League One, League Two, Champions League and the FA Cup. That’s about sixty new teams and hundreds of upcoming matches for you to have a flutter on.

It looks like many of this weekend’s fixtures could be cancelled due to frozen pitches, but once the snow melts, it’s game on!

We’ve been watching the World Cup draw with interest here in the Smarkets office. With a multinational team, the question of where the USA, England and Australia would be placed was close to our hearts.

England appear to have drawn a reasonable group (despite being in the same group as the USA) and Australia have a chance of going through too, so it looks to be shaping up to be an exciting World Cup next year.

In a fit of excitement we’ve opened the betting for every team’s first match, so place your bets on the World Cup group stages, there’s only 188 days to go!