Los Alamitos Loses the Handle When Bets Overload Computer

The 10th and 11th races, divisions of of the Miss Kindergarten Futurity Trials, at Los Alamitos on Saturday night were non-betting events because of a malfunction in tote equipment.

Wagers were accepted on the ninth race, which was run at 9:44, but the tickets could not be cashed until the system came back on line at 11:01.

“The computer system has a certain number of outstanding transactions that can be stored in the memory. Once the number of transactions hit the limit, the computer froze,” said Bob DiGiovanni, Los Alamitos mutuel manager. The track had been taking bets on Hollywood Park thoroughbred and Cal-Expo harness races throughout the day.

Once the tote system went down, United Tote employees contacted their programmers to create a new file with adequate storage for the number of outstanding transactions. Once the file was created, it took 45 minutes to transfer the data.

“It cost us about $350,000 in handle,” DiGiovanni said. “Plus, we lost at least another $50,000 in the later races and $30,000 on the harness races from Cal-Expo.”

Los Alamitos officials said that anyone with an official program from Saturday could use it as an admission pass for any night of the quarter horse season.