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FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

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Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#61

Post by Marazan »

JamesBarney wrote: post #53
dumbfounder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there was another zero on there? How about 8 more zeroes? Still think they should need to honor the bet? They offered him $500 and tickets to a game, I think he is getting greedy.

What if the situation were reversed, and I bought a wager only due to the fat fingering of my calculator, or I mistook one team for another or just had a brain fart. Wouldn't it then be reasonable for them to give a refund?

Yes, and bookies do as long refund clients' mistakes as long as the price hasn't moved that much and it is before the event.

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#62

Post by rocqua »

TomMarius wrote: post #41
zacharycohn wrote: post #32

This is why smart contracts aren't nearly as good as people make them out to be.

What do you mean? A smart contract would force them to fulfill the bet, no?

Yes, smart contracts give no recourse when there is an error.

Whether or not that is good here, in general it is an issue. That is a large reason why we have courts.

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#63

Post by stochastic_monk »

DannyBee wrote: post #14

Yeah, a quick read of the relevant regs tells me Fanduel is gonna lose this one (Unless i've missed something)[1,2] The law on this is pretty clear, and they can't unilaterally decide not to apply the gaming regulations of the state, or change them through their contracts. (They can decide not to do business in states they don't like the regulations of course) BTW, somewhat hilariously, the part they "..."'d is just…

I also wonder what they mean by mistake. I’m guessing these are set algorithmically; you can’t honestly label the times you lose money by trusting your code as mistakes while keeping money from the times it’s successful.

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#64

Post by TomMarius »

rocqua wrote: post #62
TomMarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? A smart contract would force them to fulfill the bet, no?

Yes, smart contracts give no recourse when there is an error. Whether or not that is good here, in general it is an issue. That is a large reason why we have courts.

You can program space for mistakes into your smart contract, though (e.g. no payout without final approval). Everyone would know exactly what is going to happen when.

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#65

Post by barking »

barking wrote: post #48
barrkel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to be usual practice across the industry in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/aug/02/betting-horse...

That article mentions Barney Curley, I'd recommend his book giving a little back. In it he documents a coup he pulled off against the bookies on a horse running at a small English course Cartmel in the 70s iirc. The key point was that there was just one telephone at the course. Most bets are settled at SP which is the on-course starting price. If the big chains are getting a lot of money on a horse they'll get their…

I just looked it up and I think I was confusing two different events. Curley's coup was at bellewstown in Ireland while he wasn't involved with the Cartmel one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Sam_betting_coup

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Future

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#66

Post by TomMarius »

dx87 wrote: post #60
TomMarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? A smart contract would force them to fulfill the bet, no?

No, because as has happened before, the developers just go "oops, we made a mistake in the smart contract" and nullify the gains of anybody who profited off of it.

That was only possible because the miners have united. It's not going to be that easy in the future or on a larger chain (e.g. Bitcoin).

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#67

Post by modzu »

heavymark wrote: post #37
TwitchySeal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except then they have to pay out every other time there's a bug.

I imagine if they had to honor, they would make it priority number one resolving those bugs, and make changes to make the bugs more apparent to people in the process. If they don't have to pay, there isn't much of an incentive to prioritize the fixes, especially since I imagine if the bugs are in the favor of the company they can make a lot of money.

it seems that errors are not uncommon and when they are "obvious" they typically void the contract. not sure why people are freaking out here. if you logged into your bank account and saw an extra zero that was caused by a temporary CSS bug, do you really think you are entitled to it?

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#68

Post by EpicEng »

moate wrote: post #57
EpicEng wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's within their power to improve their automated system to not offer stupid bets So then it's also within your power to never write bugs. Have you ever written any? How did that happen? It was within your power not to do so, right?

And if that bug cost his company say, $80,000 for some reason, there's plenty of instances where his company just has to eat that. I've literally made tens of thousands of dollars in mistakes over my careers (try not to make the same one twice) and 9 out of 10 times the company would go "shit dude, don't ever let that happen again!"

And what if it were 1M? 500M? 1B? They just go out of business? Your logic doesn't scale well and seems overly harsh. They offered $500 and a pair of tickets. The guy lost nothing, I think that's fair.

Re: FanDuel not honoring bet that would have paid over $82,000 due to line error

#69

Post by JamesBarney »

Marazan wrote: post #61
JamesBarney wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the situation were reversed, and I bought a wager only due to the fat fingering of my calculator, or I mistook one team for another or just had a brain fart. Wouldn't it then be reasonable for them to give a refund?

Yes, and bookies do as long refund clients' mistakes as long as the price hasn't moved that much and it is before the event.

Both which were not true of this interaction.
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