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A Fairfax County, Virginia Special Education teacher finally paid by BetMGM after that company initially cancelled a $214,000 bet tells Gambling911.com he has deleted their app and will never play there again.
BetMGM cancelled Kris Benton's three Same Game Parlay (SGP) bets resulting in the $214, 000 payout after claiming it was "an obvious error". But BetMGM did not cancel the wagers until a full eight hours after they were placed.
Benton's bets were all tied to a FIFA Women's World Cup match involving the Netherlands and Vietnam.
BetMGM to this day has failed to disclose what the odds should have actually been.
Some have supported the notion that the payout odds were "an obvious error" while others argued otherwise. Most everyone agreed that BetMGM would never have returned the funds had he lost the wager.
As for Benton, he tells Gambling911 he didn't notice anything unusual about the odds.
"He’s not an oddsmaker," G911 reporter Thomas Somach says. "He doesn’t know what the correct odds should be."
Parlay wagers are those in which gamblers are betting on more than one outcome in the same event.
Dan Weil wrote on The Street, "the average Joe is winning less, while gambling companies are winning more".
Gamblers haven't gotten dumber, especially with access to more information than ever courtesy of the internet.
Weil points to a Wall Street Journal story.
"The culprit is a form of gambling called parlay bets – something that gaming companies are promoting heavily, The (Wall Street) Journal said. In a parlay wager you’re betting on multiple outcomes in the same bet. So if it’s a horse race, you might bet on who will win, place, and show in a trifecta. You have to get all elements of your bet right – three in that example – to win a payout."
To be perfectly blunt, the sportsbooks are just asking for trouble offering Same Game Parlays.
Aaron Gray of Covers.com writes:
"Same-game parlays offer enormous potential to increase your winnings when you're deeply confident in your prediction powers for multiple events within the same game. While there's no denying that a same-game parlay can offer a strong return on investment, that doesn't mean they're not often high-risk wagers.
"Sportsbooks actively entice bettors into same-game parlays because they are profitable for sportsbooks, especially when they offer significantly shorter odds on the events within parlays. In and of itself, this very fact should raise your eyebrows and alert you to the dangers of a same-game parlay bet. Sportsbooks love nothing more than having your money in their pocket!"
No matter how you might feel about Benton's motives in placing the bets in question, BetMGM certainly made some "obvious errors".
Cancelling a $214,000 bet should have immediately triggered a compliance investigation by BetMGM that included the involvement of the commonwealth's regulatory body, in this case the Virginia Lottery. They were first made aware of the controversy after Gambling911 notified them.
BetMGM is partnered with Entain and it is the latter that primarily operates the mobile site. Entain is also the software provider and that software is supposed to be certified. These "obvious errors" can't keep happening with certified software. A regulator body like the Virginia Lottery will not hesitate to revoke an operator's license should these problems persist.
And don't get us started with the PR disaster that came out of this whole affair.
Catch our interview with Kris Benton as he also discusses how Monday was the first day of school and the reaction he received from colleagues, including the school's principal. as pretty much everyone in the region has been following this saga.
- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com
