Originally posted on 12/14/2006:

Good to get a response from the book to clarify this matter.

I don’t have a problem with enforcing the rule against multiple accounts (at least when the evidence is as laughably obvious as claimed here—a bunch of people with the same last name in the same area all making the identical obscure minor league tennis plays and insisting they don’t know each other).

I’ve never been very comfortable, though, with books that have software (or phone clerks for that matter) who will accept bets that can later be voided for supposedly being over the limit.

It’s one thing to cancel an obvious bad line bet. If I bet SEA +10, I should know it was a typo when the rest of the world has SEA favored by 10 or so. But if I bet $500 on something, and then rebet it for $500 and the software takes it, you can’t similarly say I should “know” that second bet was accepted in error, since, for one thing, it is far from a universal practice at sportsbooks to disallow such rebetting. Some allow it, some disallow it, some allow it if the line has moved, some allow it if there is at least a certain amount of time between bets, etc. The natural thing for a bettor—or for me at least—is to ascertain which type of book this particular book is by simply trying to place the second bet and observing what happens: If it takes it, the book apparently allows rebetting in this situation; if it doesn’t, then apparently not.

And I don’t think even putting it in the rules fully solves the problem. Having something in the rules that warns “Sometimes when we accept a bet we don’t really mean it” is certainly better than not having the warning, but the practice itself is still dubious.

Since the software at some books seems to have no problem distinguishing bets that are for amounts within the limits and bets that are not, it wouldn’t seem this is somehow technologically insoluble.

(I’m no longer talking about the specific case of the first time poster in this thread, by the way. I’m talking about customers who could easily innocently place bets that the software accepts but the book retains the discretion to cancel retroactively for being over the limit, not someone who makes it so obvious he’s a scammer on other grounds, and who furthermore has the limits explained to him by phone.)