Santa Anita mistakenly applied carryover to two separate pick five pools

A bet-processing error at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., resulted in a pick five carryover on Jan. 6 to be added to two separate pick five pools the following day, according to a memorandum available on the California Horse Racing Board website.

The Jan. 6 carryover from the Coast to Coast Pick 5 of $186,880.67 was added to both the early pick five held on Jan. 7 at Santa Anita and the Coast to Coast Pick 5 held the same day, according to the memo. The Coast to Coast Pick 5 combines five races from Gulfstream Park in Florida and Santa Anita into one betting series.

Gulfstream and Santa Anita are both owned by 1/ST. AmTote, the bet-processing company that made the error, also is owned by the company.

The Jan. 6 carryover was only supposed to be applied to the Jan. 7 Coast to Coast Pick 5. Instead, it was applied to both pick five bets that day.

The error did not result in any bettors being defrauded, and, in fact, it inflated payouts for the early pick five. With the misapplied carryover, the total pool for the early pick five reached $606,102 and paid out $3,766.35 for five winners.

The error was first reported by The Paulick Report.

The memorandum provided by AmTote to the stewards said that the “error went undetected” until payouts had already been determined for the early pick five, which ended with the fifth race on Jan. 7 at Santa Anita. Betting on the Coast to Coast Pick 5 had already closed by that time. According to the memorandum, a configuration setting in the bet-processing system “caused the [carryover] to be mis-applied.”

The Coast to Coast Pick 5 on Jan. 7, which ended with Santa Anita’s seventh race, had a total pool of $874,286 and paid out $584.20 on five winners. The Coast to Coast Pick 5 held on Jan. 6 had a total pool of $219,833.

The memorandum said that the configuration setting had been in place for seven years but that the Jan. 7 incident “was the first instance where the timing of conflicting pick 5s” caused an error.

The memorandum went on to say that the configuration had been changed to “resolve the acute issue,” and it laid out several policy changes that are designed to prevent the error from re-occurring.

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