Capital OTB

[MJC922]

I have fond memories of the capital district in the 80s and 90s, visiting relatives of mine who live in the area. I was envious of the OTB channel they had down there, it was always seemingly a better place to be a race fan than what we had upstate. With that said I thought I'd give their ADW a try and leave Twinspires on the back burner for awhile, not that I haven't been satisfied with them other than their rebates (obviously).

My initial impressions of CapitalOTB.com were positive, the interface is nearly identical to Twinspires, you can upload draft wagers in the same format, really nothing much to tell them apart as far as that goes. So on the surface of it I figured this was a painless transition, but then the problems... outages, I counted several days over the course of a few weeks where I would log on and the site was down for maintenance, this was all around other days like Good Friday, no wagering Palm Sunday etc, I mean it seemed like every time I turned around this place was closed for business and none of the site maintenance was apparently being done on nights leading into those holidays when it would be sensible, I guess their IT department gets bank holidays off or something. Outages though aren't the worst of it, they don't take wagers officially until 9:00 am which is a show-stopper for me, I'm at work by that time and I'm not gambling while I'm at work obviously. I emailed them about it, 9:00am is too late for a lot of people I imagine, nothing came of it.

The frustrating thing is it's inconsistent, sometimes I log on at 7:30 or 8:00 am and the tote is up, I can submit wagers and it's fine. More often the tote is down at those times, in that case I can upload drafts but can't submit them otherwise they get voided. Today was especially frustrating, the tote was up at 8:00am, I submitted 13 wagers successfully with the status pending only to get home from work later and find all of them were voided. So I give up with these people. The hours of operation aren't working out for my schedule, and I don't see the use in jumping through hoops when other places are open.

[LAP_520]

Capital OTB - - are talking about Capital Dist Regional Off Track Betting Corp located in Schenectady NY?

If you are, they have gone through a lot of changes in the past two years.

The customer service is still intact, but

The four big changes are -

The Clubhouse at 711 Central Ave, Albany NY is their "Flagship" betting parlor, and is tonly one of maybe three places that are open late at night. This place was newly built after selling the 711 property to a Grocery Chain.

http://www.capitalotb.com/clubhouse-race-book/


They have changed their hours of operation at most of the branch parlors...
.. Almost all the branches are only open 11:30 or noon until 5:30 pm or 6:00 pm

... they have closed or downsized branches, and have opened up EZ bet locations at businesses such as Restaurant/bars and bowling alleys.

Definitely , pushing the betting public into getting an on line ADW account over the past few years and they needed to stay up with the industry. Thus, about a year ago, CDR OTB and Churchill Downs Technology came together with an ADW. C D T owns Twinspires, and the ADW that is with CDR OTB is a mirror image of Twinspires ADW.

Finally, Channel 12 is no longer OTB's viewing channel... John Signor, CEO, said they needed more views so they have signed up with the following...

http://www.capitalotb.com/what-to-wa...ision-network/


May all your wagers be winning wagers.

LAP

[MJC922]

LAP thank you for the reply. I suspected there was some connection with Twinspires because the wagering interface is identical. That's what makes it all the more puzzling to me that Capital takes down their online tote systems at times when Twinspires is clearly online and accepting wagers at 8am for example. One of their replies to me stated they use a different tote than Twinspires, which went over my head just a bit because everything gets co-mingled so at some point in the chain it's all the same to me. I dunno. Maybe it'll get better, I'll hang in there until I finish running through some testing that I'm doing and then if it doesn't get better I'll definitely be exploring other options.