Nearly a quarter of a million dollars in winning bets reportedly made at MGM Resorts last Sunday may have been the biggest loss to sports betting in Las Vegas history.
Bets were made after sporting events began.
Seven longtime Las Vegas bookmakers can’t remember a bigger loss, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. But each bettor was hit in previous posts and said it’s a fairly common occurrence.
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ESPN reports that bets were allowed because incorrect start times were posted for various Korean and Chinese baseball games due to a manual entry error.
Almost all of the approximately 50 bets were made using self-service kiosks at the Bellagio complex between 1.30 am and 3 am, West Coast time. The games in question started at 1 am and 2 am
One bet was a $ 250, 10-stage parlay that paid out over $ 137,100. A parlay is a single bet that unites multiple bets, but it depends on all bets winning together.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board is said to be investigating. Whenever there is a dispute that exceeds $ 500, the state books must contact the board, which conducts an investigation and issues a decision that the books must comply with.
“It has happened to all of us,” said Westgate sports betting director John Murray. “I think every bookmaker has probably dealt with this at some point since the beginning of time.
“We have had past posting situations where our employees entered at the wrong time or entered the wrong number or forgot to close something. It is manual input and humans will make mistakes. “
The Las Vegas Review-Journal He says that Robert Walker, USBookmaking’s director of sports betting operations, is still haunted by being published in the past during his tenure as director of sports betting for MGM Resorts from 1996 to 2008.
“I still haven’t gotten past some mistakes I made at The Mirage 20 years ago,” he said. “There is no worse feeling than when you see a bet on a game that has already started.
“They turned me on some half time before. If you don’t manually close the halftime line, they keep betting and that’s what they did. “
Walker said a college football player made a $ 3,000 halftime bet at Louisiana State late in the fourth quarter, when the bet couldn’t be lost.
“Once I saw that bet in the fourth quarter, it mortified me,” he said.
The bookmaker blocked the collection while Mr. Walker went to the MGM Grand to explain his mistake to the bettor.
“He told me the story that they did not know and that they were fans of LSU. But you’re still watching the game, “he said. “But it was 100 percent my fault. They were guests of the casino, so at that moment I took their side and it was a mistake that we had to eat. ”
With Associated Press reports
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