Las Vegas Sun

I intended to dissect this ridiculous article (a story about a dispute, with no effort made to get a comment from one of the two sides involved???), but these comments are even more ridiculous.

Buzzbomb, you suggest that "There is no good reason to have an expiration of less than a year." First, no matter how long you make the deadline, someone is always going to show up a day or two later, and claim to be treated unfairly, so in that regard, 365 days is no better than 60. More importantly, since I have worked in a sports book, I disagree for practical reasons. There are several good reasons that you may not have considered.

One, for example, is the way Lost Ticket claims are handled. A player loses his ticket, and wants to know what can be done. All we can do is wait to see if someone tries to cash it. If the ticket isn't redeemed by the expiration, we can then pay the claimant. Since Lost Ticket claims outnumber Expired Ticket claims by at least 100 to 1, the rules should be constructed to help the most people. Making those 100 people wait a year does not seem to me to be the better way to handle things. And before you suggest that they shouldn't have lost their ticket, it is just as true that the Expired Tickets claimants "shoulda" done a better job protecting themselves, as well.

I haven't even mentioned technical reasons, such as the lack of computer memory in the antiquated bet-taking systems (it looks like computers from ancient times back there! Ever seen a printer that's the size of a refrigerator?), or the microscopic chance that those flimsy paper tickets should be expected to last a year.

FleaStiff, the casino suffers a great inconvenience when an expired ticket is presented. All bets, and results, are no longer in the antique computer system. The bookmaker has to go look up the score to the game, and see if the ticket is actually a winner. Doing it this way makes it easier for a scam artist to change "Kansas +190" to "Kansas St +190" or "Kansas City +190". These alterations wouldn't fool the computer (which knows exactly what team was bet on ticket number 1483DA352FE7), but might well fool a person who is reading text.

In conclusion, I just want to add that Mr Shackleford tells us that he has redeemed expired tickets "a number of times" at different casinos. He knows the rules and procedures, and consciously decides to not follow them. He may or may not be aware of the extra work he creates for the sports book staff by doing things his way, but at least one sports book manager has put his foot down to this nonsense. This manager may have even explained his reasons to us readers, if only the reporter had thought to call and ask him about the dispute (I still can't believe a newspaper would run a one-sided piece like this).

As one sports book manager I know told me recently when we discussed this story, "I applaud the Stratosphere sports book."