Thank you for participating in yesterday’s Biggest Vegas Qualifier Ever handicapping contest. As you may have noticed, we experienced technical difficulties with our contest platform that prompted us to cancel the event. We understand that you committed your time, money and energy towards the event. We deeply regret and apologize for the inconvenience. In this message, we explain what went wrong; why we cancelled the event in progress; and, what we are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We also explain what we are doing, beyond refunding all entry fees, to compensate our contestants for the inconvenience.
Here is what happened:
* After the sixth contest race was completed, our contest engine developed a database performance problem caused by a bug in our code; as a result, some of our players began to experience performance issues with our site
* For several races in a row, more than a few players were not able to make and/or update their selections
* Due to the number of players affected and the number of races experiencing the problem, we felt there was no proper and fair way to complete the contest. So, we cancelled the event.
Here is what we are doing about it:
* We have refunded your entry fee (it should be available in your account now).
* We are fixing the bug in our contest engine
* We are rescheduling the tournament. We have been in contact with the NTRA about selecting a new date in December to hold our event. The rescheduled tournament will offer the same number of spots to the DRF/NTRA National Handicapping Championship (15) and the Coast Casino Horseplayer World Series (5) as well as the same guaranteed prize money. We will contact you as soon as we have a date scheduled.
In addition to refunding the entry fee, we are also providing our top 20 winning contestants with additional compensation. With so much riding on the line in this tournament, we understand how frustrating it must have been for you – especially if you were in a top 20 position when we cancelled the event. We are therefore committing $20,000 of our funds to compensate participants who were either in the top 20 after the sixth race (the last non-compromised race) and participants who were able to make enough selections to finish in the top 20 in the final (incomplete) standings. We admit that have no way of knowing whether those standings are representative of what would have happened had there been no issues; on the other hand, contestants who were doing well in the contest when it was cancelled were definitely inconvenienced more than those who were not in the running at the time. This additional compensation is our way of acknowledging that fact. Tournament Director Rich Nilsen will be in touch with you personally if you finished in the top 20 either after the 6th race or at the time the contest was cancelled. If you have any questions about your standings at either time, please email Rich at rich.nilsen@brisnet.com.
Again, we deeply apologize for this error on our part, and we hope you will consider participating in our rescheduled Biggest Vegas Qualifier Ever, to be held in December.
Sincerely,
The TwinSpires Team