Fractions, Decimals & Percentages
April 23, 2010
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!
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.
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.
Placing your first bet with Smarkets
January 28, 2010
Placing on a bet on Smarkets couldn’t be easier, but we’ve put a little video together explaining the process. Get betting!
New Smarkets Profile & Account
January 20, 2010
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.
Smarkets in 35 seconds
December 16, 2009
We’ve put together this quick video to show the basic features of Smarkets.
We’ll be recording a bunch of videos to illustrate how Smarkets works and to introduce novice punters to the basics of betting. If you have any specific questions, check out our FAQs section or get in touch with us.
Updating the betslip
November 27, 2009
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.
