So Now Sports Bettors Are Getting Screwed The Other Way Too!!!

Haven't run across this Gawker side-site too much.  It's a site relating to law and legal matters, Redline:  Above the Law.

Tonight, it reports that the State of Nevada has sued CG Technologies, one of the major operators of sportsbooks on the Strip, proclaiming that the sportsbooks (at places such as the Cosmopolitan, Tropicana, Hard Rock, Silverton, Venetian, and Palms) underpaid winning bettors on more than 20,000 occasions over a four-year period.

It also overpaid in about 10,000 cases.

There's a reason I never have run into this problem.  (Well, two:  I rarely have used any of the sportsbooks in question - I think I've been in the Tropicana's twice!)  It's a complicated series of bets that is causing the problem, which "The Legal Blitz", who posts to Redline about matters of sports law calls "round-robin bets".

It links to Bovada, a prominent offshore Internet betting site (and hence illegal in the USA, but it's often used for odds reference online).

It's a single bet, involving three or more teams (Bovada limits it to eight). The bet allows you to pick a number between two and (at Bovada) six, and a single bet (at the amount of one parlay X the number of relevant combinations) covers all combinations of the parlay, with all winning combinations being paid.

For example, three games, two per parlay, is 3X the parlay bet.

Four games, two per parlay, is 6X.

The maximum such number of combinations is eight games, four per parlay, 70X the parlay bet.

The suit charges that this company and these books failed to properly pay off these round-robin bets -- because every combination that's successful pays off.

For example, if you had that last one, you'd pay $350 at minimum (70 bets, $5 per bet).  Each winning combination would pay $18 (win $13 plus the $5 on that combination).  You can see where someone either not competent, not thinking, or crooked would underpay in that scenario.

This is a bit of a hedge-bet against losing some games in a parlay.  An 8 for 8 on a standard Vegas parlay would pay 150-1.  If you bet $350 on that, you'd be staring over $50,000 in the face.

On a round-robin, the same 8 for 8 in the above scenario would win you a little over $900.

A copy of the lawsuit can be found at the article linked above.