Hooligans Sportsbook

Granchow

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RogueJuror
what has ganch said about the exchange?
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Ganchrow
If you hadn't noticed, Blackie from RebateWager has been dangling carrots regarding a new exchange product for some time now.

Because the idea of improving upon the existing exchange model has been a serious interest of mine since well before I started with SBR, I took the opportunity (provided by P. Loshak) to get together with the Black-Man in order to toss around some exchange ideas.

Wouldn't you know it ... we were very much on the same page.

So shortly after our meeting (and after checking the weather in Hell -- it was in fact warm and sunny) I started working with Blackie on our exchange project.

Well, fast-forward to the present and he and I have put together a betting exchange release candidate that's primed and ready for your comments, criticism, and testing.

The exchange's name is XMarketsExchange.com, and not surprisingly you can find it at http://www.xmarketsexchange.com/. SBRforum posters are invited to sign up for test accounts through that website.

Broadly, our primary software goals are twofold:
  1. Provide an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for recreational players to bet at market leading prices across a wide swath of primary and derivative singles and parlays.
  2. Continuously develop, enhance, and support a technologically cutting-edge market-maker/trading framework that empowers new market makers, while maintaining a highly flexible, easily accessible, and open source platform for more advanced users.

In other words, we want our recreational players to have fair and open access to better prices than they'd find at traditional low-juice sports books, while sharing our own technological expertise and resources with market makers so they can profitably provide liquidity.

These goals are obviously highly correlated -- the further along we get with one, the more we'll see improvements in the other. The more recreational players we bring aboard, the more profit opportunity there will be for professional players. The more professional players we have adding liquidity, the more compelling and straightforward the betting environment will be for recreational players.

Now with that said, I do want people to realize that we're taking the long view here -- we want to make sure that our core exchange software works smoothly and properly and only then start to introduce features and enhancements so as to cultivate suitable Pro/Rec liquidity across covered markets. We do aim to start running some free contests within the exchange, shortly, which we'll ask SBR to announce, but we're not going to begin taking deposits before we feel completely confident in the usability, stability, and overall excellence of our product -- this won't happen until I can honestly say that I personally would play there.

Because it's still in its early stages of development and because the UI is in such flux there currently exists no comprehensive documentation on the website. As such this phase of testing is geared towards players who already have some familiarity with betting exchanges.

For the next week or so I'll probably limit the number of new accounts, increasing it slowly as I become more confident in our setup.

If you want play around with the software I recommend an up-to-date version of FireFox, Safari, or Google Chrome. In a pinch, IE7 or 8 will also work (although I'd strongly discourage the former). IE5.5 and 6 are unsupported, and although they should work for the most part, performance will be sub par with rendering unpredictable at best. I expect that Opera should work as well, although I've not tested it.

As I’ve said, we have a lot more improvements in the pipeline, but at this point my focus is on core functionality. This is early in the development cycle so there will no doubt be bugs. Please post any you might find in this thread (no PMs, please) or e-mail me at ganchrow AT xmarketsexchange DOT com. (Posting is greatly preferred.)

A bit later I'll post more about how we aim to address the goals I mentioned earlier as well as start to introduce some pf the features we have in store for upcoming releases.

But right now I'm just hoping for as much feedback as possible on core functionality as well as any suggestions for improvements to the user interface or any other reactions, comments, or criticisms that come to mind.
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Ganchrow
Thanks for the kind words BigDaddy, JJ, Spec, eid, sneak, shari, and others. Appreciate it. :cheers:

Good comments pokerjoe and Hoja. I'm going to rejigger the sign-up wizard to make the ordering more intuitive. For the life of me I can't recall why I set it up this way in the first place.

Just as Hoja pointed out, only one live market can currently be viewed at a time. This is partially haven't-got-to-that-part-of-the-interface-yet issue, and partially a result of my desire to be parsimonious with bandwidth and processing power in the earliest stages.

But make no mistake about it -- this is simply the current state of web front-end and will be changing with a later release. As the interface matures, users will be able to have several live markets open and autorefreshing simultaneously, dragging and dropping them into desired positions.

pokerjoe, I'll get to some of your points in a later post.

kat, yes we do have big plans for a multilevel API and in-house plug-in/widget/interface/trading tool laboratory. I view this as a core part of our business model and consider among our very highest priorities,

I'll be providing a little more detail on our API and our commission structure in a post about our business goals and operating philosophy later tonight.
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Ganchrow
What I will say now with respect to commission structure is that we're looking at this as a long-term venture. Our short-term goal is not to be cash-flow positive but rather to build up liquidity and interest in the exchange while fostering a greater understanding among recreational players of how the exchange works and how it might be of benefit in general.

We don't need to make money on the exchange this year or next ... but we would like to make money on the exchange 3 years from now.

In furtherance of this the exchange has sufficient financial backing such that we most likely won't be charging any fees or commissions for the first year of operation. (Of course you shouldn't get too accustomed to this -- we're not communists, after all.) There are also existing infrastructural synergies with Blackie's existing core business that we'll be able to leverage in order to keep costs and expenditures as reasonable as possible.

So we haven't completely decided on how exactly our fee structure will look come 2011. But what I can say is that whatever structure we ultimately do put in place it will not only be straightforward and transparent enough for even the greenest of recreational player to feel comfortable with and fully comprehend but also serve to encourage liquidity provision on the part of professional players and market makers.
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