Nevada regulators moved ahead with a new rule that enables sportsbooks to cancel wagers made after the event outcome is known.

The Nevada Gaming Commission will consider the new rule on Aug. 22, just in time for football season, after the Nevada Gaming Control Board recommended approval on Wednesday. The Board considered the rule change at its July meeting, but put off a decision until staff further deliberated on the issue, due to the Enforcement Division’s inundation with requests for house rules.

The change in the regulation deals with what’s called past posting, placing a bet on a sporting event that has already started or when the outcome is known. That can happen when a sportsbook accidentally leaves open the betting option due to computer or human error.

The regulation change removes a cumbersome process whereby sportsbooks had to seek approval from Gaming Control Board Chair Kirk Hendrick to cancel the wagers; instead, they can do so promptly on their own.

Senior Deputy Attorney General John Michela told the Board that changes were made in the initial proposal; in addition to a requirement of immediate reporting to the Board, sportsbooks are given 45 days to provide a supplemental report on the details.

“It addresses the main industry concern regarding wagers placed after the outcome of the event is apparent and prevents the Board from being inundated with new and novel house-rule approval requests regarding rescission without Board chair approval,” Michela said of the new regulation.

No one commented on the proposal during the Board hearing on Wednesday.

Hendrick said they’re trying to be fair to patrons and licensees, an important and overarching goal of the Board. House rules are a contract between the patron and licensee and he added the world has changed a lot since the initial rules were enacted, especially today with mobile wagering compared to getting a paper ticket at the betting window.

“If a patron were knowingly or unknowingly making a past post, they would have a relationship with that book where the book would be able to say, ‘Maybe I made a mistake here,’” Hendrick said. “Now in the digital age, there’s an opportunity where past posting happens, a knowing or unknowing individual could place a bet on an event that has already had an outcome. That allows the individual to have no relationship human to human with the book. That allows them to take a very large wager knowingly and cash that out and leave that electronic book, so they don’t care about the relationship.”

Hendrick said if an event has already been determined, “then there’s no wager. That’s a simple fact and it will be very clear if the Commission approves this that you can’t place a wager on that and file a patron dispute on that.”

As an example, Hendrick pointed to the Olympics 100-meter dash, saying if people knew the outcome because of a faster internet connection and placed a bet with a sportsbook that hadn’t removed it, then it should not be a legal wager. “It simply did not happen.”

Board member Brittnie Watkins said she supported the rule change as did George Assad for a unanimous 3-0 vote. “Everyone is on notice and it’s going to relieve a lot of congestion and extra work we really don’t need,” Assad said.

Hendrick said “fat-fingered mistakes or fumbled-fingered mistakes” should still be presented to the chair for approval, so there’s no situation where a mistake is made on a parlay card and the licensee decided they weren’t going to honor that payment on their own.

“As the world proceeds into a more electronic type of betting environment, it seems to me to be fair to both the patron and licensee and perhaps there’s a way to put guardrails in place. The book has the ability to put things in place, like artificial intelligence, to keep their employees from making fumbled-fingered mistakes.”

The issue has garnered national headlines in recent years for past-posting incidents.

In 2020 in a high-profile incident, regulators approved BetMGM’s voiding more than $200,000 in parlay bets that were made on the operator’s mobile app and Bellagio kiosks on baseball games in China and Korea that had already started in the early-morning hours. In June 2022, Red Rock Resorts and its Station Casinos paid a $80,000 fine to the state for technical glitches in its system that accepted past-posted sports wagers.

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