How does “Push” work at UBET?
In sports betting, “Push” happens when a bet is neither won nor lost. This occurs when the betting line does not match the market outcome, or the game is cancelled or postponed. For example, if a spread is 2 and the favoured team wins by 2, that’s a push. If a total is 3 and the final score is 2:1, that’s a push.
The standard way to handle when “Push” occurs for a fixed odds system in a traditional sportsbook is that they refund the money. At UBET, the notion of “Push” is slightly different and we are writing this article to rectify the misconception. Otherwise, it can cause some miscommunications.
In order to understand how “Push” works, we must explain to you how sports betting works in UBET Sports. We view sports betting as binary option trading. We will introduce the notion of shares, maturity date, and contract terms.
Suppose Bob makes $10 bet with 2.0 (+100) odds.
At UBET, your payout is defined by shares. A moment you bet $10 at an average purchasing odds of 2.0, you receive 20 shares.
The value of the purchase bet at any given time is computed as
For example, the value of your bet when you first purchased is $10, because the price of 1 share is $0.50=(1/odds=1/2) and you hold 20 shares.
When the game ends and settles, the price of the share becomes 1 or 0 depending on whether you bet the correct or wrong outcome!
Hence when you win, the value of your bet becomes $20, since you have 20 shares that are worth $1 each.
Note that the number of shares you hold is fixed, while the price of a share can change depending on the market odds when the game has not settled:
As you can see, this really resembles option trading. It has a maturity date, and the terms of the contract, that said the price will be 1 or 0 depending on the result of the game. The buy and sell price will be driven by the market price of odds.
Now how are these related to “push”? 🤔
Your purchased bet needs to be converted once the push occurs. Then, what’s the value of your purchased bet? We stated above that
the value of purchase bet at any given time = # of shares * the price of a share.
Hence, the value of your bet uses the price of a share to calculate, and return them to you.
The value of your bet is the same as your investment only when the odds remain the same (e.x., you invested $20, and your purchase bet is worth $20 if the market price is $0.5). Otherwise, the amount that is returned to you is different, which can be more or less dependent on the market price of odds versus your purchased price of odds!
We would like to point out that it is not possible to just refund the original amount because we don’t have control over the price of a share. Fortunately and unfortunately, we are decentralized! Only centralized exchange has the control to change or manipulate the price of shares.
We think that this is not a deal breaker, but a good thing in some sense:
This shows that we are really decentralized, unlike other web3 sportsbooks that call them decentralized but they are not, except that they use blockchain wallet.
Sports betting mechanism is really ancient, especially the fixed odd system. We are encouraging the industry and bettors to move towards the mindset of trading rather than gambling.
There are many defects in traditional sports betting systems like a hard limit on bet size, hard limit on withdrawing, etc. These are not in our system because of our decentralized design.
Thus, it is a tradeoff.
We understand that some bettors may like it or dislike it. It is up to you to decide and we respect your decision. In the future, we may look into the solution on how to refund if this really turns you off.
For more reference, please review the following articles:
UBET SPORTS Reference:
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