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New Alert Services and SureBetBookies Update

Posted by Aegist on May 9th, 2008

Easyodds.eu, Bettor-Paradise, Shurebet Plays4You and Arbets have all been added to the alert services page. They have also all been added to the SureBetBookies database, and all of the alert services have had their bookmaker lists updated within the database (so all lists are now accurate so far as our bookmaker list goes).

We have already started adding a few more bookmakers to our database, and more will be continually added over the coming months. Please remember that if you find any information on SureBetBookies to be innacurate in anyway, it is easy to go to that bookmakers details page and submit a Correction form to inform us. We are constantly checking the information ourselves, but with over 100 bookmakers now in the database, the information changes faster than we can find it.

Back to the alert service page - in the interests of page speed we have split the alert services page into two, removing all of the extinct alert services from the main page. The main page of active alert services is still pretty long, so it will still take a while to load, but not as long as it was taking. Please tell us if you find the loading time to still be too long and we will consider breaking it up into even smaller sections.

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EasyOdds.eu Review - First Impressions

Posted by Aegist on April 30th, 2008

EasyOdds.eu are a brand new arbitrage alert service just launched. With a couple of days of looking through their service so far under my belt, my first impression is that they have some ambitious goals with some novel ideas, but are still struggling to get it all off the ground.

Being a brand new alert service in an already competitive market must surely be a difficult position, and the advice I regularly offer new alert services is that offering something unique is a huge advantage. EasyOdds have offered two unique elements in their service - the ability to view a graph which shows a historic trend of the odds in that market at the bookmaker in question, and the ability to follow a link straight to the sport and market in the arb (rather than going to the homepage, then finding your way to the market yourself) - however their ‘newness’ is still very evident and you spend most of your time dealing with bugs and sub-optimal design flaws.

The fact is, most of the time there is no active link to the bookmaker at all, let alone an active link straight to the market in question - very rarely is this actually the case. Similarly the historic data is pretty rare. Most annoying is the fact that all of the links open in the same window - so following the link to the bookmaker (and the specific market in question) actually takes you away from EasyOdds! Ditto with the historic data on the odds - you suddenly find yourself looking at a small graphic where there used to be an alert service!

But this is exactly what I mean by “Newness”. This is such a simple bug that it should be incredibly easy to fix. Hopefully with time more bookmakers and markets will be linked to and that feature will become more useful, as too will more historic data be accurately collected.

All of that being said, there is something which is far more important than unique elements, novel approaches and new gadgets - reliable arbs. Having run EasyOdds alongside my comparison alert service for these few days has really made me realise how I have probably been giving the wrong advice all this time: if you want to launch a new alert service and stand out in this competitive market - just make an alert service which can actually get all of the odds and compare them across all of the bookmakers accurately, and you will have a market leader. It doesn’t even need to be very fast - just thorough and accurate.

What continues to surprise me when I compare alert services side by side, is how two different pieces of software which both claim to search the same sports across the same bookmakers can consistently find different arbs. Unfortunately, EasyOdds has missed many arbs which my comparison service has found - but that being said, it has also found one or two which the comparison service didn’t. Surely it is possible to make one service which finds them all!?!

Lastly, the display needs improving. It is crammed and hard to understand at first. Even once you adjust to it and understand all of the elements, they still cram words into small boxes and are forced to abbreviate league and player names. This means they often leave out small bits of crucial information, forcing you to inspect each of the possible tennis tournaments on at the time, or go through every spanish soccer league one at a time until you find the game in question. Organising arbitrage alert displays is never an easy task, but it is an important one.

So, from my first impressions of EasyOdds I can appreciate some of their new innovations and I look forward to watching those ideas develop, but at this stage of their foray into arbitrage, they still have a lot of basics to improve upon and bugs to fix. I will continue to run EasyOdds.eu alongside my comparison alert service for the next 3 weeks, and continue to post observations over that time as I feel necessary. A final review will be posted at the end.

EasyOdds.eu is one of the most recent alert services to be launched, and as such are largely unknown at this stage. They have recently been added to the comprehensive SAG arbitrage alert service page, and will soon be added to the SureBetBookies bookmaker database so you can browse through the details of their bookmakers.

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