Sure Thing
One of the biggest and most underreported stories in racing is the ongoing scandal that is the technologically-outdated tote system. While it seems to work most of the time, news of past-posting incidents of varying seriousness keeps breaking, creating a nagging sense of doubt among players. The latest occurred last month, Ray Paulick reports:
The fourth race at Philadelphia Park June 28 was just a run-of-the-mill claiming contest until the Scientific Games totalizator system malfunctioned shortly after Magical American crossed the finish line as the winner. The top three finishers (4-2-3) were put on the board, but the problems with the tote delayed Philadelphia Park from making the race official and posting the payoffs….
A little over a thousand miles away at Tampa Bay Downs on Florida’s Gulf Coast, some horseplayers became curious about what impact the tote failure had on the AmTote wagering machines there.
Lo and behold, they discovered wagers made on the winning horses in Philadelphia Park’s fourth race were still being accepted. The Paulick Report has learned that players started punching out win tickets, exactas and trifectas. The delay, from the time the Philadelphia Park race was run until someone in the Tampa Bay mutuels department realized there was a problem, was about 10 minutes, at which time betting was halted. It was nearly 15 minutes from the time the race was run until the Florida track received a stop betting order from Scientific Games (formerly Autotote).
When the system was restored, Tampa paid out more than $13,000 to bettors who’d taken advantage of the glitch (most of that to one player, who apparently made $1000 in wagers). Dick Jerardi, picking up on the story, points out that the payoffs were unfairly affected for players who had legitimately bet the race:
It is fairly obvious the winner would have paid quite a bit more had the “past posting” not taken place. The daily double, combining the 3-5 winner of the third race and Magical American, paid $32.40, quite a bit more than a 3-5 combined with a 7-2 shot should have paid. Without the very late (and very illegal) betting, Magical American likely would have been 8-1 or so. The $27.20 exacta with second-place Ironton also likely was low.
A couple themes apparent in other recent reports of past-posting appear in the telling of this incident: That the tracks involved, or the TRPB, did not disclose the problem and its effects immediately, and that for all the investigations and fixes in various processes (more on that in Frank Angst’s ThoroTimes article on the incident) there is little sense that there is any urgency on the part of the industry to plug the gaps and update the tote network. Meanwhile, the Wagering Transmission Protocol (PDF), which would be a huge step forward into transparency and accountability, languishes, and bettors are left wondering again how much, really, they can trust the system in which they play.
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