Semi-constructive Twinspires criticism

[FenceBored]

As is typical, I cannot not call up yesterdays' bets in Recall Today's Bets' ("why should you they're from yesterday"), but they are not yet available in a Detailed Account History Report. So, until noon or 1pm they just sort of fall into some kind of hole. Irritating.

The data needs to be available one place or the other at all times.

[startngate]

This is no doubt related to the tote failure yesterday. My guess is that AmTote has a lot of work to do to restore its systems, and the building of the daily bet history files they send to the ADW's is probably low on the totem pole compared to making sure the system is up and stable for today's racing.

In the case of TwinSpires, the "Recall Today's Bets" function is precisely that ... recalling today's bets ... so yesterday's bets aren't going to be there by design.

Yes, the information should be there, and I'm sure it will be as soon as they get it out of the tote system. Is it a pain in the butt in the short term? Yes again.

The one thing I do know from my software systems experience is that as bad as these crashes can be, they usually bring to the forefront things that were not engineered for because they weren't on the radar screen .... not because of ineptitude, but rather because it basically was a 'perfect storm' that caused them. You always have backup systems in place (and often backups of backups), but sometimes multiple unconnected things all fail together in an unexpected way.

I'm sure that if the true story ever comes out about the hub failure, it won't have been something simple or stupid that occurred. I'd also be willing to bet that it wasn't the TwinSpires software or hardware that failed based on the early reports I have seen here and elsewhere.

Sure, ultimately its their responsibility because they own the customer relationship. When systems crash that are beyond their control I am willing to cut them a little slack because I know there will be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prevent this from happening again. Any downtime sucks ... especially when you are trying to get down a bet, but the current TwinSpires system (and its predecessor at AmericaTab) has been (until yesterday) very stable and reliable on busy days ... with far fewer amounts of down-time than any of the other majors.

TwinSpires has been pretty forthcoming about explaining things that have happened in the past, and it will be interesting to see what they have to say after the 'post-mortem' is done.

[FenceBored]

Not being able to see a detailed record of "yesterday's bets" anywhere on the system during the morning is an everday occurance, completely unrelated to the hub failure. I've seen it regularly for some time. It used to be that "recall today's bets" would still show yesterday's early in the morning, but now it doesn't.