Station Casinos deem itself exonerated despite post-game scandal

The Station Casinos were given an $80,000 penalty by the Nevada Gaming Commission Board on Thursday for taking wagers on sporting games whose results were already known.

The NGCB lodged a claim in September last year, against the gaming corporation situated in Las Vegas. This came about when Station self-reported a system issue, which resulted in its mobile wagering software accepting 167 bets on games that had already concluded.

The NGCB had already warned the corporation of a breach three years prior, and of a related problem that was discovered in June 2018. Between June 2018 and March 2021, a total of about 350 illegal bets were allowed to be placed.

Officials at Station obliged to pay the fee in agreement of the settlement, despite the fact that they neither admitted nor refuted the NGCB’s allegations.

“However, respondents specifically admit that they failed to maintain their virtual servers on which their mobile sports wagering app operated,” John Michela, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general for gaming, told the commission. “That this failure may have led to the acceptance of extensible past-posted wagers, and that this failure to maintain virtual servers occurred after respondents responded to a 2019 (order to show cause), which included apparent violations concerning the maintenance of servers.”

The ruling made it very clear that Station required consistency in its supervision procedures in order to guarantee that no wagers were placed on already completed matches.

Attorney Marc Rubinstein, who represents Station Casinos, informed the council that a defect in the sportsbook system caused server data vaults to fill up more quickly than planned, and that this was the root cause of the problem.

In their response to the court order issued in 2019, Rubinstein stated that Station authorities had reached the conclusion that they could work on the defect in order to prevent it from happening again. The response was to establish alerts on the servers so that staff would be notified when the drives had reached 85 percent of their storage.

However, back in March of the previous year, an unmonitored server hit its RAM limit, which caused the problem to surface again.

In addition to that, there have been additional instances of bets being placed after the end of the game that were not brought on by the memory problem. According to Rubinstein, one of those was what caused numerous bookmakers to start accepting bets like that.

“That’s kind of what precipitated us accelerating a discussion of settling the case,” Rubinstein said. “Because, frankly, from our point of view, we felt vindicated in our initial position that a complaint really shouldn’t have been filed and are settling this really – even though it’s, we think, a very high number – settling it for nuisance value. Because it would be very expensive to litigate.”
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