Legal sports betting in the United States showed its inexperience this week after bettors at New Jersey’s Meadowlands racetrack left the venue without being paid their winnings.
The Meadowlands’ FanDuel-branded sportsbook hasn’t been open two weeks and its growing pains were on full display Tuesday night after winning bettors attempted to cash out following the conclusion of a marathon baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Initial reports via bettors’ social media feeds indicated that many bettors were unable to cash out their winning tickets, allegedly due to the sportsbook not having sufficient cash on hand. This mishap occurred despite some punters claiming that FanDuel staffers had told them that winning tickets would be processed following the game’s conclusion.
On Wednesday, ESPN scribe David Purdum quoted one of the aggrieved bettors saying he’d been told by FanDuel staff that the money needed to pay all bettors was “in the vault” and couldn’t be accessed until morning. The bettor, who was flying to Atlanta in the morning, said he and other bettors in his situation “kind of left disgruntled.”
FanDuel issued a statement on Wednesday saying that the sportsbook’s cages were required to close at 1am and that the book “cannot take wagers or pay out wagers after that time.” The statement insisted that “there was no issue with cash on hand” and winning wagers would be paid out if tickets were submitted at the cage Wednesday or mailed in.
(We’re deeply disappointed in you, ‘Murica. If this miserable existence truly was a wonderful life, FanDuel book manager Jimmy Stewart would have leapt up onto the counter and pleaded for calm, then convinced the bettors to each only take exactly as much of their winnings as they needed to get them through the night, and then Bert & Ernie would have serenaded everyone to sleep.)
As gambling industry ‘scandals’ go, this one’s pretty vanilla, and given the nascent US betting industry’s relative inexperience – this is FanDuel’s first attempt to offer anything other than its daily fantasy sports core product – similar growing pains are to be expected, likely causing much social media angst but no lasting damage.
And hey, just wait until FanDuel or its competitors find themselves on the wrong end of a proper injustice like the one recently perpetrated by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which shamefully refused to pay out on a $6,210 winning ticket based on strict adherence to scoring rules.
