McIrish --
Perhaps, as you say, your experience (and by "your", I mean the collective experience of you and the other Rx regulars) has colored your perception of all subsequent allegations by allegedly wronged gamblers.
My experience has proven exactly the opposite. All I get from most sportsbooks is headaches, chicanery, payout delays, and attempts to do me wrong. Why do I continue to play? Believe me, if I lived in Vegas or anywhere near there, I'd have given up the online thing years ago.
It doesn't surprise me at all, given the nature of their business and the way they choose to make money, that books are sometimes less than scrupulous in their day to day dealings with players. While everyone here immediately seems to believe that any player complaining about a book is lying or cheating himself, I give the player the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, because I wouldn't put it past any unregulated, quasi-legal company whose business plan is to relieve their customers of their money for nothing tangible in return to cheat.
What DOES amaze me is how quick Rx readers and posters -- supposedly a forum for the betterment of players -- are willing to discount whatever a player says. Consider my last complaint here. I posted something that happened to me a few weeks ago and got virtually no sympathy: I placed a bet on the phone and the clerk didn't give me a readback, which CS told me explicitly is required for finality of a wager. To me it seems absolutely cut and dry that the bet should have been cancelled, regardless of result. And I'm sure if I had posted the story here WITHOUT revealing the result of the game, everyone would have concurred that if the clerk fails to give you a readback, and a readback is required to confirm wagers, then the bet is null and void.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of revealing in my initial account of the story that the bet turned out to be a loser. So almost all the Rx responders came down against me..."if it had been a winner, you wouldn't be posting" blah blah blah. There's this bizarre, vindictive, vulture-like tendency to come down on players on this site...and it comes from other players.
And it's very much not appreciated.