Gambling errors result in lost money

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. And sometimes, the cards aren’t shuffled correctly, or at all.

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-honoured 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, New Jersey, 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 Fan Duel’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 honour 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. But 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.

Others were not as fortunate. AA video poker player in Canada was twice erroneously told he had won $1 million in 2009, but the top prize on the machine at Ottawa’s Rideau Carleton Raceway was only $40,000.

He got $4,000 and $1,000 instead.