Smarkets Blog

Being an small team can really pay off sometimes. I blogged about the Alastair Campbell thing a while back, and in a similar vein, the current media interest in the Andy Coulson/Phone hacking story made an interesting diversion this week from working on the Euro Qualifiers and upcoming horse racing markets.

When the media is heavily covering a story (and as long as it doesn’t violate our editorial guidelines), creating a market around an issue can be a really interesting way to track the mood of the betting public.

The story was weather Andy Coulson would resign from his position in the Conservative Party after the New York Times published an article into whether he was complicit in phone hacking. We opened the market and immediately the momentum was behind ‘yes’. Bloggers blogged and Twitterers tweeted and within an hour it has swung strongly towards ‘no’. Now the market is more settled and it’s gently bobbing around 15% no / 88% yes.

This example is exactly what we love to do at Smarkets; put up markets that captures the public attention and watch as rival opinions and media coverage moves the market in different directions. Whether Coulson will leave or not is up to him, but it’ll be interesting to see whether the ‘wisdom of crowds’ was proved correct.

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.

We’re entering the final phase of the 2010 World Cup and so far it’s been an eventful tournament.

The defending champions are out, the French stormed off with a collective gallic shrug and the English, yet again, failed to live up to media expectation. But it’s not all doom and gloom, there are ten more games to play, so lots more of the World Cup to bet on.

Brazil are still favourites to win the tournament but both Argentina and Spain have put in some solid performances and could produce an upset. Gonzalo Higuain leads the Golden Boot betting (he wears Adidas boots by the way, so they might be contenders for top scoring boot).

There haven’t been any sendings off during a shootout yet, but the dirtiest team so far has been Chile. Take a look at the rest of the betting opportunities at the 2010 World Cup with Smarkets.

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.

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.

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!