Fingers burnt by fiddling with the system for no good reason

It would not have been pretty at Monday's meetings at Sports Road after the online betting debacle of the Sunday Sha Tin meeting, and rightly so.

That the problems with eWin likely cost the Jockey Club 'only HK$30 million' in turnover would not have been the trend of the discussion as 'only' isn't normally the prefix that chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges uses for talking about betting turnover.

The biggest off-course players do not use the unsophisticated eWin website access to place bets - it is simple, bread and butter stuff without the complexity to be of much use to punters laying out arrays of bets.

eWin is intended for small players looking for convenience and simplicity, and therefore doesn't carry as large a slice of betting as the Customer Input Terminals. Which is just as well or the 'only' would have had a much larger number following it.

But eWin is part of the club's customer service platform with reasonable expectations that, some day, it would become more versatile and carry a larger volume of turnover.

And in that customer service regard it was a day of failure for the many horseplayers as convenience and simplicity vanished to be replaced by frustration and annoyance.