The Independent Arbitration Service was asked for a ruling, following last month\’s controversial decision by Betfair to void all bets on the tournament won by Adam Scott.
Nissan Open IBAS ruling :
Many of the disputes referred to IBAS revolve around the interpretation of language in a bookmaker’s or betting exchange’s rules or the wording of a proposition. The disputes arising from the 2005 Nissan Open are different in that there is no confusion over the terms used in the rules or the proposition’s wording but rather over what was the official result as determined by the tournament’s organisers.
It is the accepted precedent in betting disputes that wagers are settled according to the result as declared on the day by the event’s organising authorities even when that result may be demonstrably incorrect.
If a judge places a horse incorrectly but the weighed-in signal is given then that result has to stand. Similarly, if a football referee fails to spot a ball crossing the line for a goal or a boxing referee incorrectly counts out a fighter it makes no difference – the result as declared on the day by the sport’s officials stands for betting purposes and changes to the result or its status made later have no effect on wagers.
The problem with the Nissan Open is that the USPGA, the officiating body for the event, adopted two diametrically opposed positions.
On the one hand they have invoked their rule that says tournaments of fewer than 54 holes will not be deemed official and stated they therefore do not consider the 2005 Nissan Open to have been an official tournament.
Yet they also organised a play-off under their auspices to determine the tournament’s winner, presented him with the trophy and, acting as agents for Nissan, the winner’s cheque. It is hard to imagine that their contract with Nissan would allow the USPGA to present the winner’s cheque to anyone other than the tournament’s legitimate winner.
Furthermore, Adam Scott will appear in the USPGA Tour records for 2005 as the Nissan Open winner and also has been awarded 75% of the World Ranking points, though he will not be eligible for the Mercedes Championship or the two-year Tour exemption normally associated with the winning of the Nissan (or any other official weekly US Tour golf event).
In effect, the USPGA are trying to have it both ways. They used their authority and acted in an official capacity to declare Scott the winner on the day but then said the result was not official. It is hard to see how these actions can be reconciled.
Indeed, the behaviour of the USPGA is in total contradiction to the normal practice of organising authorities when an event is abandoned or declared void and there is therefore no official result. In those cases the situation is usually clear-cut – for all official and record purposes the event is deemed not to have taken place. It therefore follows that all bets placed on such events are void.
It is inconceivable to envisage a situation where, say, the Jockey Club would declare a race void (as in the case of the 1993 Grand National) but then list the ‘winner’ in their official records for the year. Similarly, goals scored in abandoned football matches do not count for a competition’s leading goalscorer contest. The USPGA have done the opposite by listing Scott’s win on their website and awarding him ranking points.
There are, of course, instances where bets are settled on an official decision in a contest that is later rendered unofficial. Bets on first goalscorer or time of first goal in football matches that are subsequently abandoned are a good example of this. Historically there is no official record of the game but at the time the goal was scored it was the subject of an official record.
In the Panel’s opinion a similar view should be taken for the 2005 Nissan Open. In our view the only logical way to interpret the USPGA’s actions is to say they delivered what can only be taken as an official result on the day for a 36-hole tournament but then deemed the tournament’s status unofficial because it was not at least 54 holes.
We also have to say that in our view the USPGA have adopted the wrong terminology in classifying tournaments of fewer than 54 holes as unofficial. As we have stated, by awarding the winner the trophy, cheque and ranking points and recording the result on their website they are giving the tournament recognition and, in our opinion, de facto official status.
What they are presumably trying to say is that tournaments that do not have at least 54 holes will not be classified as full-ranking tour events for exemption and other purposes. That, in our opinion, is a world away from declaring them unofficial, a word that has vastly different connotations, especially when it comes to betting markets.
Be that as it may, it is inescapable that the USPGA both declared a winner of the tournament and at the same time said the tournament was unofficial.
Virtually all bookmakers interpreted the result of the Nissan Open as a win for Adam Scott. This is consistent with their rules. Some firms cover the situation by having a rule which says that when bad weather foreshortens a tournament then the winner will be the player receiving the trophy, whereas others say that they will pay on the official winner irrespective of the number of holes played.
As the play-off and trophy winner, Scott was undeniably, in IBAS\’s opinion, the official winner of the 2005 Nissan Open ignoring the number of holes played. It is only the number of holes played that led the USPGA to declare his win unofficial.
Therefore in IBAS’s opinion bookmakers whose rules state they will pay out on the official winner ‘irrespective of the number of holes played’ acted correctly in paying out on Scott and settling other bets as losers.
Only if the USPGA had abandoned the tournament completely, made no attempt to decide a winner and made no record of the tournament’s final placings on their website would bets have been void.
At first the Panel were of the view that Betfair should also have settled their market on the result on the day. However, after further consideration of Betfair’s rules, the duty of an exchange to both backers and layers and the provision by Betfair of the information they received from the USPGA we had no alternative but to revise that opinion.
Firstly, Betfair’s rules make no reference to the number of holes played or the player receiving the trophy and simply say that if a tournament is abandoned and no official result declared all bets will be void.
While it is clear that the tournament was not abandoned it is also the case that Betfair were given the following statement by the USPGA:
PGA Tour rules state that 54 holes of a tournament must be completed for the result to be deemed official. Therefore the 2005 Nissan Open was not an official result and Adam Scott’s win is not official.
IBAS has received similar advice from the USPGA.
If Betfair’s rules had specified a minimum number of holes to have been played or had said that the number of holes played would not have any bearing on whether a result was official or not then there would be an argument for saying that they were obliged to settle on the ‘result on the day’ – the normal criterion for settling bets.
The absence of such conditions, however, means that Betfair are bound by the USPGA’s determination of the event’s status, no matter how questionable that determination might be.
Equally if the statement issued to Betfair by the USPGA had been less categorical then there would have been a case for saying that the market should have been settled on Scott as the winner. Indeed had there been such leeway it would have been in Betfair’s interests to settle the market as by voiding it they forfeited their commissions.
As it was the USPGA statement put Betfair in an impossible position. As an exchange they have a duty to both backers and layers. And while backers of Scott could claim that the tournament was not abandoned, those who laid him, particularly during the second round, could also reasonably argue that they were doing so knowing that at least 54 holes had to be played for the USPGA to declare the result official.
If Betfair had settled the market with Adam Scott as the winner and a losing layer had complained to IBAS citing the USPGA statement then it would have been impossible for us to have denied their claim as there was nothing in Betfair’s rules which entitled the exchange to give preference to the ‘official result on the day’ rather than the USPGA’s definition of the official result..
In the Panel’s opinion, therefore, Betfair had no choice but to void all bets on the market as their rules place unequivocal reliance on the official result as determined by the USPGA.
There is a recent parallel with Big Brother 5 where the programme producers handled the virtually identical involuntary departures of Kitten and Emma differently. Kitten was announced as being evicted (even though there was no eviction process) but Emma was not and another housemate was subsequently listed as the second eviction.
Betfair, not unreasonably, interpreted Emma’s departure as the second eviction but, because their rules and market text stated that they would settle on the official evictees, IBAS had to rule their action incorrect. Illogical though it was to treat Kitten and Emma differently that is precisely what the programme producers did and the official second evictee was, in fact, Vanessa.
As we wrote in that ruling, there are many instances where the official result may be disputed (as in a referee’s decision in boxing or an umpire’s decision in cricket) but if a market is stipulated as being settled as solely on the official result then neither backer nor layer nor exchange operator is entitled to substitute their opinion, no matter how well-researched or logical, for that official decision, no matter how inconsistent or illogical that official decision may have been.
For events where betting is not a prime concern – and a golf tournament held in the USA certainly falls into that category – bookmakers and betting exchanges need to formulate positions that reflect the realities of betting markets rather than relying on a decision that will probably have been made with different criteria in mind.
In the Panel’s opinion exchange operators and bookmakers would be well advised not to rely solely on the ‘official’ result for such events – to do so puts them at the mercy of decisions made by third parties disinterested in betting markets – but to establish clear-cut criteria of their own.
For golf betting this would mean either stating a minimum number of holes or else saying the result on the day stands no matter how many holes are completed.
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