From A.Lorne Weil Chairman of Autotote Parent Scientific Games Corp conference call 5PM today.
\"I think this is actually a good thing for the industry. At least it happened at a time and place where we were able to catch it and prevent any harm...As far as I can tell there has been no fallout from the betting community relative to the integrity of the game.\"
Talk about a spin doctor.
If you want to hear the Autotote clown squirm and spin-doctor this fiasco, heres the link.
http://www.autotote.com/AutototeCorp/corporation/investor.asp
Is there any method which allows a small stockholder to ask questions and/or otherwise participate in these calls, which I\'m always reading & hearing about? If the answer is yes, I think we should all buy a few shares just to participate in the next one. Assuming you sell the shares the day after the call, the cost will pale in comparison to the reduced payoffs caused by the fact that Mr Weil(no relation to Sandy I hope) has no idea what he\'s doing or what he\'s talking about. Rest assured, to the extent anyone in the industry is willing to listen to Mall, this guy & his company will be a distant memory at next yr\'s BC.
Up to now, I was following this pretty much the way I followed the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, but after hearing Weil, Pierce & the Co\'s mouthpiece, I feel sick. In my opinion, Weil still has very little idea what happened or why it happpened, & most of the call was devoted to either how this is going help the co going fwd or to figuring out if the costs associated with his & his co\'s incompetence can be passed on to others. Thanks to Jim for the link, & I strongly recommend that each of you listen to what Weil has to say before you write, call & email the new task force demanding that he & his co be replaced.
1. David: One of the things Weil claimed was that his co has no financial liability resulting from this. You\'re an attorney. You work for a casino. I need to understand why this would be so. Surely those that invest their money in a rigged contest have some rights & I for one would like to see them enforced. I would be willing to be lead plaintiff in a class action with the proceeds going to any worthy or maybe even any unworthy charity.
2. What happened in terms of responsibility is this. The system in use was adopted many yrs ago at a time when it would have been very expensive to transmit all selections prior to the 1st race. The cost of doing so today, & this has been true for many yrs, is, in Weil\'s words, \"minor.\" In other words, nobody ever looked at or considered the question until what Weil is calling a \"rogue software engineer\" was caught changing the bets on the 1st four legs after the races were over. Everything you\'ve read & heard about it being difficult or impossible to transmit this data may have been true at one time, but it is an excuse & a lie today, something which those using the excuse surely know. That may not include Weil. If some of you do listen in, try to count how many times Weil says the selection data is sent after the 5th leg. I lost count.
3. Weil says his co\'s detection system \"worked & worked fairly quickly.\" The ultimate joke & the ultimate insult, but he\'s apparently too thick headed to see what\'s coming. It\'s clear from the audio that there was a similar call on Tues of this week, & that Weil & Pierce, ala Groth, spent the entire time saying that nothing was amiss because the bet was placed on time. In other words, the possibility of inside help is something which did not occur to him, his dimwitted president, or his oddly named general counsel. Weil claimed today that his co would have eventially picked up what happened, but \"not as quickly.\" Of course, none of the buddy, buddy analysts who asked questions bothered to inquire as to whether this meant yrs, decades, centuries, or what. At this pt, is there anyone who would be willing to bet me at even money odds that this didn\'t happen before and/or that the kids who pulled it off won\'t be singing & Weill won\'t be eating his words before long? If so, listen in & you\'ll change your mind before the call is completed.
4. Pierce has already talked to Gallagher, who was described as supportive & sympathetic, at the NYRA & Weil didn\'t waste any time going straight to the top. Dinny is said to have described the antiquated system Weil was & still is using as an \"accident waiting to happen.\" The solution? What else, yet another new task force, to which Weil & his cronies have already been extended invitations. Well, that has certainly worked well in dealing with the drug & other scandals, so I for one am willing to say that this problem is as good as solved.
5. The co. lawyer says that the tracks have long term contracts which cannot be cancelled under these circumstances. It\'s nothing more than a hunch, & one would obviously need to study the language in some detail, but my guess is that he knows as much about contract law & how litigation works as Weill knows about how the pk 6 & his co works, but there is virtually no chance that those in charge are willing, or even know how, to play hardball.
6. Keep in mind that none of this even applies to Amtote, which handled what now seem likely to have been fix sixes on 8/4 & 8/17. So we can all look fwd to a new cast of \"rogues\" & a new batch of lame excuses & incompetence & who knows, maybe a link with Derrick & his friend.
Enough is enough. For many yrs,I made as much or more betting college football, even though it was boring. At least most of their games are honest contests. Someone let me know when it\'s safe to wade back into the pool.
Mall:
There\'s a poster at the majorwager.com forum who says he has talked to a lawyer and is close to filing a lawsuit in NY. If you want to email him his email address is:
buzzravanaugh@hotmail.com
Mall,
My legal skills are rusty -- it being 5 years since I last practiced -- but I believe I recall some case law that a racetrack does not owe a duty to bettors with regard to their monies wagered. There have been lawsuits over allegedly fixed races, over races where the payouts were incorrectly posted and other misdeeds. My memory is that the case law is pretty strong that as a bettor you do not have a claim against the track. I don\'t know the cases or the reasoning but that is probably what Weil was referring to.
Now, in this case, since they have frozen the winning proceeds and since all of the p5 consos were tax tickets, it should be pretty easy for bettors to be made whole once this gets sorted out. I can\'t imagine what else they would do with the $3 million.
mr patent brings up a good point regarding the limited liabilities of tracks, not that i am justifying that status, at least not in this egregious case.
i did some research this summer on an instance at saratoga that occurred on the Lady\'s Secret Whitney undercard in which the stewards took down the wrong horse.
a horse jumped the inner turf rail during the stretch run and the stewards incorrectly ruled that the eventual unofficial winner bore in, causing the accident, when in fact the first horse past the wire was a couple paths away in the middle of the stretch. it never made contact with the injured horse.
i think there was a three horse spill, and amidst the confusion they didn\'t heed the innocent jock\'s pleas (i believe it was either santos or crueget--the horse was named altemuse if i\'m not mistaken).
there were no refunds and the stewards admitted that they blew it the next day. you can look it up.
if something that blatant can go uncorrected than i\'m not too optimistic about future lawsuits. but i hope i\'m wrong.
David: You\'re undoubtedly right, particularly as the races themselves were not fixed. I really don\'t want to be a plaintiff anyway, & I blame the anger(which has not entirely dissipated) in my post at least a little on the see-throughs I had before I listened to Weil & Co. I saw that Brisnet is conducting a poll & that 50% of those who have responded say that the scandal will not have any impact on their wagering. I still think you were way off on the % of casual fan money on big days, excluding the Derby, but maybe there\'s an opportunity in the stats, since I also thought you were wrong that a lot of serious players have poor money mgmt habits. My stance seems doubtful for those who can\'t even stop long enough to find out if the fix is in.
An interesting sidelight to the BC P6 fiasco is that many of the 5 out of 6 winners probably used a ten-percenter to cash the winning 5 out of 6 tax ticket.
If there is an extra $35,000 to be paid on the 5 out of 6 tickets based on fed tax info submitted when the ticket was cashed, there must be a frenzied chase going on right now as the winners try to find the cashers who I would imagine are not hanging out at their usual trackside haunts.
The \'wrong\' horse at Saratoga was named ALLEMUSE. I bet him @ 7 to 1 as I recall. He was dropping an allowance condition in the days when DRF made no distinctions in their pp\'s. I remember Harvey Pack telling everybody to hang on to their tickets on his show that night since the courts would surely rule in our favor. Held that ticket for almost 5 years before turning it into confetti. Don\'t hold your breath, David\'s right.
Mall,
You do not need to own stock to participate in these conference calls. Check yahoo finance and SGMS and they will post as \'news\' when they will have their conference call and instructions to dial in. They have no way of knowing whether you are in fact a stockholder. HP