A third-party provider that helps facilitate in-person sports betting at Encore Boston Harbor said Tuesday an illegal wager on a Boston College women’s basketball game occurred at the casino partly because officials rushed to upload an approved betting catalog only days before retail betting went live.
During a nearly hour-long morning hearing, members of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, Encore, WynnBET, and sports betting technology platform GAN outlined in detail how a patron was able to include a Feb. 2 Boston College versus Notre Dame women’s basketball game in a $70 parlay made at a kiosk inside the casino.
It is the first time the Gaming Commission has held a judicial-like proceeding to determine potential penalties for a sports betting licensee that allegedly broke state law and local regulations.
Regulators did not decide on an outcome during the public portion of the hearing, which featured a cordial conversation between officials of the three entities. Commissioners entered into a private session to determine next steps and said they plan to issue a written decision at later date, though the exact timeline was unclear.
What did become apparent was initial confusion among Encore and Gaming Commission officials as to the specific behind-the-scenes errors that allowed betting on an in-state regulator season game in February.
Commission officials first said the wager was placed because a GAN employee had “mistakenly omitted” all NCAA women’s basketball games from a prohibited wagers list. But state law does not place a blanket prohibition on NCAA women’s basketball — only on in-state teams playing a regular season.
That initial version of events was not the case, said GAN Vice President Robert Lekites.
“I just want to clarify, the entire NCAA women’s was not left off,” he told regulators. “[Boston College women’s basketball] was the only team in all of the NCAA, the all-banned list. So Harvard was properly blocked. Boston University, Merrimack, UMass, UMass Lowell, all those teams were properly blocked. The only one single Massachusetts college team that was available to make wagers on was Boston College Eagles women’s basketball.”
The state’s sports betting law bans wagering on in-state collegiate regular season games, and only allows betting on in-state teams if they are in a tournament with at least four teams, such as March Madness.
Lekites said the team managed to slip through because Boston College had multiple names in GAN’s backend system. Employees went through to make sure local collegiate teams were blacklisted from wagering and even barred betting on the Boston College men’s team.
“Unfortunately, there was a second name in there which is how this kind of came through to the system,” Lekites said. “We just weren’t aware that there was a second name in our system for that team, and that’s how it came through.”
Part of the issue stemmed from a compressed timeline to upload and double-check an approved wagering catalog, a list of events and sports that regulators have said patrons can bet on at casinos or on their phones.
A day before in-person wagering went live on Jan. 31, Lekites said GAN employees went through the approved betting list and blacklisted teams that state law prohibited people from wagering on.
But employees at GAN “had very little notice to actually go through the entire system to match the approved wagering list,” Lekites said. “That was a manual process to go through to do all that. Typically, we would have done that with code and we would have done that well in advance. But that was done the day before.”
The entire approved wagering catalog could only be uploaded to Encore’s betting systems “right in those final days,” said Encore Senior Vice President Jacqui Krum.
“It was a bit of a rush but clearly we knew that the collegiate teams in Massachusetts were prohibited,” she said.
A handful of measures have been put in place to make sure that “this will never happen again,” Lekites said.
GAN now marks every single NCAA sport as “disabled” when it sends information to WynnBET, the sportsbook running wagering at Encore, which then manually approves and enables collegiate games for betting.
“There’s no automatic flow,” he said. “Even if it gets through that first barrier of the .. naming convention block, it does come through now into a manual process to have to enable that event.”
- Read more: Regulators investigating illegal collegiate bets at Encore, Plainridge Park Casino
- Read more: Plainridge Park Casino illegal bets have regulators focused on communication ‘flow’
Regulators planned a similar 12:30 p.m. hearing on illegal wagers offered at Plainridge Park Casino on a Feb. 2 regular season Merrimack College men’s basketball game.
Commission officials previously said a total of $6,848 was wagered with total winnings of approximately $4,270 over the course of seven hours.
And the Gaming Commission will meet again on March 31 to discuss a second round of illegal wagers placed on a separate Boston College women’s basketball in February. Commission Sports Betting Director Bruce Band said those banned bets occurred because of a glitch in GAN’s system.