Rules mandated 'all' paid out for Tampa Bay Derby in multi-race wagers

Races that are declared non-wagering events are required to be treated as “all” bets in multi-race wagers, officials with knowledge of bet-processing rules said Monday.

The requirement came to light this weekend when Tampa Bay Downs on Saturday declared its most prestigious race, the Tampa Bay Derby, as a non-wagering event due to a loss in communication with its bet-processing provider beginning late in the afternoon. Tampa paid out all of the multi-race bets ending in the Derby as an “all,” raising questions from bettors about why the official race result was not used to determine payouts for the bets.

The Tampa Bay Derby was won by Domestic Product, who would have vied for favoritism in the race with the second-place finisher, No More Time. All other bets on the race other than the multi-race wagers were refunded.

The outage that disrupted Tampa’s Saturday card began at 4:52 p.m., just after the Florida Oaks had been run but before the prices for that race could be calculated by the bet-processing system. The outage could not be restored over the ensuing hour, leading Tampa officials to decide to declare the Tampa Bay Derby a non-wagering event. The race was run 39 minutes after its scheduled post time.

Bettors also expressed consternation and criticism over the lack of information that was being provided to them as the evening wore on. During that time, wagers on the Florida Oaks could not be redeemed, and the track was unable to provide updates as to when the payoffs for the Oaks could be calculated. Track officials also did not know at that time how to treat the multi-race bets ending in the Derby, because they did not know the status of the Oaks either.

Peter Berube, the longtime general manager of the track, said Sunday that communication with the hub in Maryland that processes its wagers was not restored until 11:35 p.m. on Saturday.

“We were in the dark on all of this until the system got back up,” Berube said.

The communications link between AmTote and Tampa was provided by Roberts Communication Network, a longtime data-services supplier for bet-processing companies in the United States. On Sunday, Roberts and the parent company of AmTote, 1/ST Racing, issued a joint statement contending that the outage occurred due to a loss of connectivity on both its main communications link and its back-up link to Tampa.

Broadband connectivity is provided to Roberts by a company called Lumen, according to Todd Roberts, the founder and president of RCN. The connectivity contract with Lumen includes two links over separate lines and technologies to maintain redundancy in case one of the links goes down, Roberts said.

In the Saturday incident, both of the links went down at the same time. The links were contained within the same building, Roberts said, but “were not on common paths, and they weren’t on common equipment.”

Although Roberts said he has not yet received an official “reason-for-outage report” from Lumen, he said that the outage had nothing to do with the equipment or services used by either RCN or AmTote.

“We know it was a hardware failure on [Lumen’s] part, but that’s all we know right now,” Roberts said.

Although it’s extremely rare for both links to go down simultaneously, Roberts said bet-processing companies have been able to work around a simultaneous outage in the past by re-routing the data to another in-house network at the wagering site. That workaround was used for other tracks that also were affected by the Saturday outage, Roberts said, leading to delays on the order of 15 or 20 minutes until the data links could be re-routed.

Officials also attempted to re-route the data to Tampa, but both of the track’s in-house networks – maintained by Comcast and Time-Warner – also were out, Roberts said, leading him to believe that the connectivity for those networks also was provided by Lumen.

Berube did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

“I just feel very bad for Tampa Bay,” Roberts said. “They are a longtime customer, and it was their biggest day of racing. That’s why I’m pulling my hair out on this.”

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