Sidebar

[dilanesp]

Originally Posted by ScottJ

For those not familiar with a "corner case", the term refers to a typically obscure situation in software engineering which might be a bug (or a feature), but requires an unusual set of circumstances to expose it.

Last Friday, a $432 ticket purchased on Del Mar's jackpot Pick-6 with a 20-cent minimum (2,160 combinations) was hit with a unique ticket resulting in a payout of $555,195.00. This was noteworthy not only because of the payoff, but we were once again chasing the definition of the word "unique".

Folks watching the Del Mar television screens that day might have seen the "wrong payoffs" posted as in fact there were believed to be two live tickets into the last leg.

How could that error be made? Well, here is the corner case.

In one of the sequence legs, a horse was scratched, moving that selection to the winning post time favorite, who was also on that same physical ticket. Therefore, the ticket effectively had the winning horse twice allowing some to argue that the winning ticket was no longer "unique".

However, since the ticket was purchased as one cohesive unit with a single serial number, the unique ticket criteria was met, hence the payout.

This might be the greatest case study for caveman ticket construction ever offered as it turns out to have been the saving grace for this player. If two different serial numbers had been generated, the bonus payout would have been voided.

This indicates that the "fix" (which TBC was only a partial fix) they implemented is working- this guy deserved to get paid and was.