Cubs’ win just the ticket

A story that broke in mid-July made me wonder if Chicago residents have copy machines. Some Nevada sports books reported that up to 30 percent of those holding futures bets on the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series last year didn’t cash their tickets. Why? Because they wanted to keep their betting slips as souvenirs.

A futures bet is taking odds before or during the season that your team will win the title. So right now you could bet that the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the World Series and get 3-to-1 odds (at Bovada). The Oakland A’s are 500-to-1 to win MLB’s title — and the San Francisco Giants are off the books.

For much of last season, the Cubs were 4-to-1, and when they won the World Series for the first time in 108 years, those tickets paid off. But many of those tickets, even some large bets, haven’t been cashed.

ESPN reported that at Las Vegas’ Golden Nugget more than 20 percent of futures bets on the 2016 Cubs remained uncashed in mid-July. And CG Technology, which operates sports books at the Venetian and Cosmopolitan, said more than $100,000 in winnings remained uncollected when the six-month payout period expired in May.

Johnny Avello, director of the sports book at Wynn Las Vegas, said the percentage of uncashed tickets at Wynn was much lower than the rate at the properties covered in the ESPN story. “There may be some small tickets out there,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle, “but the significant money has been cashed.”

Wynn recently extended its payout period to a year (from four months), so anyone holding a Wynn bet on the 2016 Cubs can still cash it, Avello said.

There’s always a small percentage of futures bets that go uncashed, he noted, because some people die, forget they’ve bet, or lose their tickets. But even lost tickets can be paid, Avello said, especially if bought with a players card, which makes tickets easy to track. Wynn will do everything it can to find and pay off lost tickets. “That’s our business,” Avello said. “We don’t want money that’s not ours.”

At MGM, the number of uncashed tickets on the Cubs was about three times the normal rate, said Jay Rood, MGM’s vice president of race and sports, but he didn’t say what the percentage was.

At William Hill, which operates more than 100 sports books in Nevada, the number of uncashed Cubs tickets was small and virtually identical to the number of uncashed bets on the New England Patriots after their Super Bowl victory in February, said spokesman Michael Grodsky.

But many William Hill bets are from Nevada residents who aren’t as likely to be Cubs fans, he said, and more than half were made on a mobile app, which pays automatically.

William Hill typically has a four-month payout period but will make exceptions, for example, for anyone serving in the military.

Michael Shapiro (www.michaelshapiro.net) is author of “A Sense of Place.” Twitter: @shapirowrite