Once again, GambetDC seems to be in shambles as a sportsbook in the Nation’s Capital. The growing number of failures may bring about changes to right the ship.
The problem came to a head when the Apple app was nonfunctional for users on Super Bowl Sunday. Seems the shutdown relates to the expiration of the app’s SSL certificate in January. The Office of Lottery and Gaming provided everything Intralot needed by January 6 for the update.
Intralot did not provide the update until February 10. The update included more than it needed and led to a rejection, OLG Executive Director Frank Suarez said.
GambetDC has 30,000 registered users, Suarez said, though he admitted only about 6,000 are active on any standard week. About 60 percent of those users are on iOS devices, Suarez said.
GambetDC had a handle of $309,000 on Super Bowl Sunday.
DC Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie called the Super Bowl outage a national embarrassment.
“You all state that Intralot did not understand the process required to deploy an updated mobile app for iOS, complicated the update by adding unrelated software enhancements, provided poor quality assurance, demonstrated bad decision-making, failed to mitigate harm, and misrepresented the situation to the Office of Lottery and Gaming. That is so deeply troubling on so many levels.”
McDuffie also asked what kind of assurances are in place that such a mistake will not happen before March Madness betting later this month.
Suarez said Intralot already made changes. There is a new vice president of operations, as well as a restructuring of the team from Intralot that serves the OLG, including adding an employee focused on just the sports betting business. Intralot also increased its quality assurance.
Hearing how the estimates were totally wrong led McDuffie to an interesting point Suarez could not sidestep: if the information used to make these estimates and decisions on how DC sports betting operates was incorrect, maybe it is time for a study to see where the market actually stands.
The last study on GambetDC from the Office of the DC Auditor showed the app is underperforming and offered a number of changes, most of which have gone unheeded.
