What makes you think they didnt put the cash up?
I dont think books let you bet into track pools without funding your account.
Officials at FanDuel are focusing their investigation into Wednesday’s suspicious betting patterns on a glitch or a hack that resulted in one or more of its accountholders being able to place bets at a fraction of the actual cost of the wagers or at no cost at all, according to multiple officials who have knowledge of the probe.
According to the officials, the malfunction or hack allowed the bettor to build enormous bets on Wednesday without the costs of the bets being properly subtracted from the account balance. The activity of the bettor or bettors attracted industry-wide attention when the wagers reached millions of dollars by mid-afternoon, plainly visible on the tote feeds of the tracks targeted by the bettor.
After shutting the accounts down, FanDuel released a statement Wednesday night saying that it had “identified technical issues and potential fraud” in relation to the outsized bets. The company added that it was “undertaking a full review of this matter and will make public additional details at its conclusion.”
FanDuel is the owner of TVG and a separate platform called FanDuel Racing.
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FanDuel declined to comment when asked for confirmation of the targets of the probe, other than reiterating its Wednesday night statement.
If the problem arose from inadequate deductions from the account or accounts, it would go a long way toward explaining the behavior of the bettor or bettors, whose activity led to head-scratching throughout the pari-mutuel community.
The bets were concentrated in the superfecta and super high five pools. The wagers were constructed using the “all” button for every slot in the bet, according to officials, guaranteeing that the bets would generate payouts. But most curiously, the bets were made at enormous multiples of the base denomination, a strategy that drove down payouts. As a result, the bets appeared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to the enormous costs and reduced payouts.
For example, the bettor made $554,400 in wagers into the super high five pool at Churchill Downs in the fourth race on Wednesday, using the “all” button in all five spots, at $220 for each of 2,520 combinations, insuring 220 winning tickets. On paper, that generated $85,434 in winning tickets, but a net loss of $468,966.
If the bettor was able to make bets at a fraction of the true cost, then the net calculation could have a vastly different result. If, for example, the system was not deducting any money from the player’s account, the net result for the Churchill race was an $85,434 profit. At 10 cents on the dollar, the net result would still be a profit of nearly $30,000.
The bet-processing system in the U.S. relies on betting information to be transmitted from the various nodes in its network into one common pool. Under a scenario in which the bets were not being accurately deducted from the account, the FanDuel system would still be sending the total amount bet and the combinations, regardless of the impact on the player’s account balance.
Wagering sites are typically held accountable for the information that is relayed by their systems into commingled pools, so FanDuel is likely on the hook for the bets. All of the tracks targeted by the bettor paid out the bets based on the information in the commingled pools.
It remains unclear how many pools the bettor targeted. Based on historical betting patterns, it appears likely that exacta and trifecta pools were also targeted by the bettor before the accounts were shut down mid-afternoon on Wednesday. However, one official said that the glitch or hack had been traced to new code introduced into the system on Tuesday night, limiting the impact to Wednesday’s races.
