DraftKings Error: Should Massachusetts Pay? Discussing Fairness
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - DraftKings erroneously reported,
00:05 reported, erroneously posted a sports bet
00:08 that was easily winnable for people who are not familiar.
00:12 And it was up for about 15 minutes.
00:14 And a lot of people bet it, and they won the bet.
00:18 Some are getting paid and some are not.
00:21 Who should get paid here?
00:23 And I know Massachusetts,
00:24 the story here that we're gonna cover
00:25 is the fact that Massachusetts doesn't have to pay out.
00:28 Is that right?
00:29 Do you think that that's fair?
00:30 Their mistake?
00:31 - Yeah, Craig, this is a tough one.
00:34 This is one that the commission even had
00:36 a tough time deciding.
00:37 It was a three, two vote, right?
00:38 So two commissioners said they should have to pay out.
00:41 And then three said no with this condition attached
00:44 where they'd get like three times
00:45 their initial stake in bonus bets.
00:47 But for some of these people that were able to,
00:49 you know, take advantage of this error,
00:50 I mean, one guy, I think won, you know, six figures.
00:52 And unfortunately now he'll get three times his state back
00:55 in terms of that same game parlay.
00:57 You know, this was an error by Sportcast
00:58 according to DraftKings,
00:59 their third party vendor for same game parlays.
01:01 You know, basically, you know,
01:03 whatever LeBron James over under
01:04 in this Nuggets-Lakers game was,
01:06 maybe it was to score 30 points.
01:08 They had them listed for eight and a half.
01:09 They had a lot of these players,
01:11 just their first quarter totals
01:13 listed as full game totals.
01:14 So a couple of people jumped on it.
01:15 I think it got on Reddit, some social media platforms.
01:18 Hey guys, you know, there's an error here.
01:19 Let's try to bet this.
01:20 It was up for, like you said, 13, 15 minutes.
01:22 And yeah, I mean, it's a tough one because, you know,
01:27 as Jordan Maynard, one of the commissioners said,
01:29 maybe not in this case, you know,
01:30 if they had put out this bet,
01:31 people took advantage of LeBron James,
01:33 let's say getting eight and a half points.
01:34 He breaks his leg in the first minute, they took the bet.
01:38 Are they gonna come back?
01:39 Maybe not in this instance, but other ones that say,
01:41 oh, you know, we realize these people
01:43 tried to take advantage of us.
01:44 We won the money to the house.
01:47 We're gonna repay these people.
01:48 I don't know.
01:48 You know, you hope that they're a good enough business
01:51 to do that, right?
01:52 'Cause you want that customer loyalty.
01:53 You want to make sure your customers are taken care of.
01:55 But like you said, yeah, right?
01:56 They're like, you tried to take advantage of us.
01:58 LeBron got hurt.
01:59 He only scored two points.
02:01 We're taking your money.
02:02 So that was the argument I thought made a lot of sense to me
02:06 that they should have to pay this out.
02:07 Yeah, it never happens.
02:08 Okay, so then, you know, I mean,
02:10 $500,000 what they'd have to pay out of it was 600,
02:13 is a lot of money relatively speaking.
02:14 But I mean, they're dominating in that state.
02:16 They want their customers to come back.
02:18 I mean, maybe, you know,
02:19 what's the long-term business strategy here?
02:21 Will customers come back to this?
02:24 Or will all the ones that lost this bet say,
02:25 okay, forget that, I'm going elsewhere.
02:27 You know, this company's not really taking care of me.
02:29 I tried to kind of pull on over on them.
02:32 Yeah, I don't know.
02:33 I mean, I think it was a tough decision.
02:34 It looked like it was gonna go the other way
02:36 where DraftKings would not have to pay out.
02:37 They had to pay out New Jersey and Connecticut.
02:39 There were 17 other jurisdictions that said no.
02:41 Yeah, Craig, I don't know.
02:42 I think it would have been nice
02:44 for them to pay the people out, say,
02:45 you know, we screwed up, we'll own it.
02:47 We'll hopefully take care of our third-party provider.
02:50 I think they're doing it in-house now with their MBA odds.
02:52 And then be done with it.
02:53 Yeah, I agree with you.
02:54 I don't know about this one.
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