Commingling issue delivers a $69 million hit to Hong Kong turnover

A significant issue with the database which handles the commingling of global betting pools into Hong Kong caused long delays to the Sha Tin program on Sunday and forced World Pool to abandon plans to operate on Irish 2000 Guineas day at the Curragh.

The issue occurred before the ninth race at the Hong Kong meeting, just after the running of the Group 1 Champions and Chater Cup, won by Voyage Bubble.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club was forced to initially delay the race by 37 minutes, as it attempted to sort through a problem with connecting with other pools across the world.

“At 1640, we found an intermittent connectivity issue to our database with some commingling partners,” a club statement read.

“As we could not resolve the connectivity issue until the start of Race 9, we have decided to take out the investment of all our commingling partners received via our database and recalculated the final odds of Race 9 for dividend payout.”

“Subsequently, we proceeded with local investment only for Races 10 and 11.”

The ensuing snafu had a major impact on turnover across the last three races, with payment of dividends for races via correct weight not received for over an hour.

Instead of betting into a global pool, Australian punters were confined to an Australian-only pool. In race nine, that totalled just over $49,000 for the win pool, as opposed to $4.8 million in the previous race.

The Australian tote win pool for race 10 was $63,000 and it was $65,000 for race 11. That led to some unusual variation in dividends.  

The winner of race nine, Stellar Express paid $18.10 on the Australian tote, but only $13.85 in Hong Kong. In race 10, the winner, Gold Master was $2.30 in Australia as compared to $2 in Hong Kong, while the winner paid an unusual Australian place dividend of $5.50, as compared to $1.15 on the HK tote.

Australian tote punters also got a superior dividend in the last race, with the Zac Purton-ridden Top Dragon paying $7.40, as compared to $5.55 in Hong Kong.    

HKJC chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges told the South China Morning Post that the impact on turnover was around HK$350 million, the equivalent of AU $69 million.

“When we looked at the issue, we decided we will not approve any commingling bets in the pool of race nine because we were not 100 per cent sure if all the bets were in the system or not,” he said.

“It’s very clear there was a connectivity issue and it was intermittent and then we cannot take the risk. So that’s when we decided to zero-out – pay all the overseas bets refunded and keep only the local bets and calculate the local odds, to make sure there is no issue.”

The turnover loss was mainly via overseas betting, but Engelbrecht-Bresges said the issues with the pools, and the subsequent drop in turnover would have a compounding effect on local investment as well.

He said that the HKJC was confident it would have the issue resolved in time for Wednesday’s meeting at Happy Valley.

However, the problem did also prevent the HKJC-powered World Pool operating on two key races in Ireland on Sunday.

It was set to field on the Irish 2000 Guineas for the first time as well as the Tattersalls Gold Cup, but those plans had to be abandoned after Sunday’s issue.

The issue would among the most significant for the HKJC since it launched the World Pool in 2019. It has been commingling overseas betting pools into Hong Kong since 2013.

System ‘technical fault’ continues to plague Tabcorp

Tabcorp has continued to be impacted by outages during the spring carnival, with customers again unable to place online bets during a Group 1 day of racing on Saturday.

The StraightWarwick Barr

World Pool, which is scheduled to operate on 36 different meetings between January and July this year, has been hailed as a possible parimutuel solution for global wagering, promising greater liquidity and a global calendar of feature races.

Critics have highlighted that the take-out rates for World Pool are generally higher than they are for local Australian totes.

Race clubs in Australia benefit directly from the relationship with World Pool, with the Australian Turf Club likely to receive over $1 million in World Pool distributions should Hong Kong star Ka Ying Rising compete in The Everest this year.

Australian punters are no stranger to parimutuel outages, with Tabcorp fined $1 million after a major issue during the Melbourne Cup carnival in 2020 which took out betting for much of Stakes day,

Tabcorp also suffered technical outages during the early parts of last year’s spring, with Makybe Diva Stakes day, which was part of the World Pool program, impacted by online problems.