TOTALISATOR MISTAKES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3135, 3 February 1911, Page 7

TOTALISATOR MISTAKES.

INVESTORS SURPRISED

A good deal of curosity was expressed at Christchurch on Monday, when Air J. MeDougall, mho Fas charge of the totalisator at trotting meetings in Canterbury invited the investors on Piecework, who won tlie Sportsman’s Handicap at the New Zealand Trotting Club’s meeting on Saturday, paying a substantial dividend, to meet him at his office. They were a mere handful, but they came from the highways and the hedges, and at his 'request signed their names to a statement chat they had backed the horse and indicated the windows at which tlieir tickets had been purchased. The mystery was not fathomed for them at the moment, and the popular opinion was that tlie totalisator had paid out too much money, and was anxious to come into its own again. The totalisator is, of course, generally supposed to be a mechanical embodiment of that well-loved supposition that “figures cannot lie,” but it lied very badly on Saturday through an accident that was quite unforeseeable, and that cannot in any way reflect upon its integrity. Blocks of totalisator tickets are numbered from the figure 0 in sequence, with the result that when the totalisator clerk has sold 0,1, 2,3, 4, his b.oc.v shows that 5, which is the next ticket is the number of tickets that lias been disposed of. Unfortunately in the case of Piecework a block of tickets had come from the printer in a faulty condition. Numbers sto 14 inclusive were missing, and when the club officials came to check the figures the block showed lo as its top number, indicating that lo tickets had been sold instead of 5. The dividend was worked on this basis, unci it was only when the totalisator proprietors discovered that their cash was £23' over that the mistake was discovered. Fortunately the investors^were singularly few and could be easily identified by the clerks who had paid out tlie short dividend, and Air MeDougall has; now accounted for the whole of the investors, who are to be paid t.ie dividend money after signing tlie necessary declaration. , , , ~ The mistake was first traced by thefact that the holder of the block of tickets that was short was ten 10s tickets short in his cash, and m accordance with the rules of the totalisator haa to r.nv the £5 from his own pocket to make his cash balance. .. , It is intended in future to have blocks more systematically checked _ in order that there may be no repetition cf an acc’clent that was quite unforeseen ana that was not blameable to the totalisator officials. The ddivdend, which was a very substantial one as it stood, has now been increased by over 50 per cent.