BEATING THE ODDS: BAD BET HONORED
FanDuel pays $82,000 despite glitch
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — When people gamble, things sometimes go wrong.
Roulette balls glance off the wheel onto the table. Slot machines jam. Online betting apps freeze. Dice go flying off the felt. Bettors have even lost payouts when the jockey fell off a winning horse before the finish line.
The recent decision by online gambling company FanDuel to pay an $82,000 prize its computers wrongly promised a bettor on a football game was the exception to the time-honored rule in the gambling industry: When things go wrong, it almost always voids the bet.
Kip Levin, FanDuel’s chief operating officer, said that in sports betting, there are more than 200 ways to place a bet on a typical game, most of which are calculated at lightning speed.
“You’re very reliant on technology,” he said. “It’s like when a slot machine malfunctions. Things happen.”
They happened when Anthony Prince of Newark, N.J., placed a bet in the waning moments of a Sept. 16 football game between the Denver Broncos and the Oakland Raiders. During an 18-second malfunction, FanDuel’s computers gave a dozen bettors exorbitantly inflated odds on the Broncos kicking a game-winning field goal. Instead of a few dollars, Prince was handed a bet slip promising him $82,000 on a $110 bet.
Denver made the kick and won the game, and Prince went to the window at FanDuel’s New Jersey sports book to collect — only to be told that the system had made an obvious error, and that FanDuel was not obligated to honor the promised payout.
Industry officials and regulators say they do not keep statistics on how often bets are voided due to errors.
But they do have a term for some of the bigger screw-ups: “palps,” short for palpable errors. While the standard for determining what is a palpable error is somewhat subjective and almost always determined by the bookmaker, it was clearly in play here: A small bet on a high-probability field goal should not be rewarded with $82,000.
FanDuel relented after a few days and agreed to pay Prince — and 11 others who also got mistakenly inflated odds on the game — the full amounts that were erroneously promised.
Others were not as fortunate. A woman is suing Resorts World casino in New York City after a nearly $43 million slot machine jackpot was determined to be a malfunction, and was voided in 2016. (They offered her a free steak dinner.)
Linda Schwoerer Tria of Butler, New Jersey, was betting on a Mohegan Sun app this year when it froze. She complained, only to be told — correctly — that a malfunction voids the bet.
“I felt like I was ripped off,” she said. “Finally got the bonus wheels on Wheel of Fortune and it froze. I had my heart set on a big win and ... nothing.”