William Hill Review - Not Recommended
We no longer recommend betting at William Hill. You can see a list of alternative places to bet on our bonuses page
For a long time the biggest bookie in the UK, and still one of the biggest brands, William Hill have a lot of history. After being an early adopter of online gambling, they eventually fell by the wayside somewhat, before clever tech partnerships gave them a life saving shot in the arm.
They have since kept up the pace, however, and now deliver a website that is a pleasure to use, with more events and market variety than you can find almost anywhere else. This industry titan is great if you like to watch the fixture you are betting on live, and throws more than a handful of promotional offers into the mix to boot.
The Plus Card is of huge benefit to punters who also bet with cash in store, and since there are over 1,400 of them you won’t have to walk far to do so.
William Hill has been providing gambling products to its customers since 1934, and from those humble beginnings it has gone on to become one of the best known brands in the industry. They now employ over 16,000 people, and host players online in over 180 countries.
It hasn’t all be plain sailing however, and the company has come under fire several times in the past; once being fined 6.2 million (ouch) by the Gambling Commission for accepting large sums of money linked to illegal activities.
It can’t be denied, though, that William Hill offer their players a truly superior online product, with a great mobile app available as well. Much of the casino software is powered by Playtech, but there are plenty of others, so you know you are in good hands with a site that won’t let you down and Jackpots that regularly smash the one million pound barrier.
The website retains a traditional feel while at the same time providing a contemporary online gaming experience, with Slots, Table Games, Live Dealers, Jackpots and more all available, and it couldn’t be easier to find what you want. The layout is clean, there are no obnoxious flashy adverts, and all in all it’s a pleasant and unintimidating interface. This is good news for new comers in particular.
Markets & Odds
Customers at William Hill are given an awful lot to work with. The list of sports categories totals 32+ even on a slow day, with all of the usual suspects backed up by plenty of American sports as well as comparably strong Specials, Politics, and Esports offerings.
Best Odds Guaranteed is available on all UK & Ireland Horse and Greyhound Races, but races from around the world are also available to bet on and Live Stream, and in fact, a lot of other promotions are aimed at punters in this category too.
Odds come in Fractional, Decimal, or American formats, and in general are usually quite competitive; Basketball fares particularly well, and William Hill like to offer top prices on the really popular events and markets too. If you are an occasional gambler then this could be the place for you.
Market depth doesn’t really get much better, certainly not when it comes to Football. They have every market and bet type imaginable. We wouldn’t call Switzerland vs Qatar a big game, but there it is with 271+ future markets. There are often enhanced markets available within each event as well, so there really is acres of room for manoeuvre from the punter’s point of view.
William Hill might get pipped to the post by a tiny margin in one or two areas, for example, depth of markets in Tennis fixtures, but not by much at all, and in most categories they dominate when it comes to bet variation and choice.
Live Betting/Streaming
The in-play area is very strong for live streaming, incorporating the video into the interface to allow betting and viewing to go hand in hand. They cover more events than most other operators and better still the Watch Live service is free to use.
If you want to watch the Horses then the obligatory £1 wager applies, and every major UK race is covered along with most Greyhound races as well. What’s more, the feeds are clear and don’t glitch from our experience.
William Hill continue their good form with market depth and variety here (they boast 100 ways to bet in-play), but we did notice that more events were available at some other sites. We have to say, though, the selection of 5 Minute bets are great for an adrenaline boost, and odds remain competitive especially for Football.
It’s a funny one because the in-play area doesn’t look like much, but it does everything that you would need it to. Sport by sport categorisation and event numbers give punters an instant view of what is going on, cash out capability and number of markets are clearly on show, and you can even select to see Watch Live events only. Used in tandem with WH Radio, for example, this is a great way to spend time betting on sport.
Once an event is expanded things improve visually, showcasing a fantastic game graphic where live streaming isn’t available, with live text commentary, a game timeline, and a good level of statistical data laid out plainly.
Casino Software, Platform, Games
First things first, William Hill has bucked the trend and shed hundreds of games in their casino until only the most excellent titles remain.
This leaves you with about 300 titles, with Playtech probably being the major player in the arena. This makes sense given Hill’s long standing partnership with the company, and means players are gifted with some of the best games and biggest jackpots in the industry.
Despite what sounds like a limited number of options, the range of games still seems endless and there are loads of other software providers, with Microgaming, NetEnt and Cryptologic all making an appearance, plus multiple smaller providers and a few of William Hill’s own products as well. Enough to keep you busy for weeks on end.
- Slots – Explore 300+ slots from more than 10 developers. There is a massive amount of choice here from series’ such as Age of the Gods to quirky adaptions like American Dad.
- Jackpots – With scores of jackpots there is something for players at all levels. Some, such as Beach Life, are currently pushing towards the two million mark.
- Live – With 2 live casinos going at the same time, this is the place for live players. There’s VIP Blackjack if you’re feeling flush, French Roulette if you’re feeling continental and Live Texas Hold’em if you’re feeling… like a cowboy.
- Roulette – 10 variations of Roulette await you with varying table limits. If you want something different go for 100/1 Roulette; if you want to mix slotting in then Age of the Gods Roulette is a good shout.
- Blackjack – Ever popular, there are 9 Blackjack games at William Hill, and everything is covered on these exclusive tables. First Person games, single hand, even Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven Blackjack, you name it.
- Poker Tournaments – Frankly, there are loads. Every day scores of games of Hold’em, Omaha, and Omaha Hi-Lo are on offer, with buy in’s starting at 50p allowing players at all levels to join in.
The look of the Casino site is pretty simple without being boring, incorporating its own categories that you can use to narrow down your search. These are well thought out and the additional search bar makes it even easier to find what you are looking for. There is an option to download the casino (powered by Playtech) and they also make it easy to see the rules of each individual game. User friendly indeed, and if you are a new player then something you will no doubt be thankful for as you find your feet.
Live Casino
There are actually two live casinos at William Hill.
The first is Playtech’s live casino product which contains more than 60 different games covering all of the expected game types plus some new poker options and some fun Game Show style games.
Also, in the Live Casino powered by Evolution Gaming you will find double the number of games, covering all of the same game types plus some interesting variations that add depth to the collection. Branded titles like Deal or No Deal and Monopoly Live are especially popular, and you can choose exclusive tables to give a different atmosphere depending on how you are feeling on the day.
Blackjack is a particular strength for live players at William Hill, you can play for pennies or fortunes at scores of different tables, and there are William Hill exclusive tables in both live casinos too, where they can do things in their own way and run their own promotions etc.
Lotteries
Lotto feels more like a game to us which is why we talk about it here, but William Hill list their lotto betting in with their sports list. It’s technically a bet since you are betting on the outcome of the lottery rather than entering the lottery itself, but anyway, let’s leave the semantics there.
It’s not the most attractive or user friendly interface to bet on, but the range of lotteries you wager on is great. It’s a good mix of European and American/Canadian/Australian competitions, but once you get into the betting itself there is no flavour of the lottery’s origin, it’s very bare.
Nevertheless, you can win at odds of 150,000 to 1 for 5 correct numbers, so there is big money on the table if you are lucky enough. Just be aware that this is an all or nothing situation. Although you can bet on any number of balls from 1-5, you will need all of them to come in for your bet to win – if you bet on 4 balls and 3 of them come in that is a losing bet, you need to match all four.
Poker
Online poker is a huge market, and as a one stop shop gambling site William Hill would be mad to exclude it. They aren’t mad though, so they have a standalone poker product with its own loyalty club, promotions, and cashier.
This does mean that you will have to transfer money into your poker account specifically, you won’t be able to use funds in your regular William Hill account, but this is par for the course.
It’s a comprehensive offering, with plenty of tables available for buy ins big and small, multi table tournaments, twister tournaments, sit and gos, speed poker, Omaha, Hold’em, 7 Card High… the list goes on.
It is available to download or as instant play, but the downloadable client is being improved all the time so if you have space it’s worth going for this option.
You can choose the specifics of the game you want, from cost, average pot, number of players and game type so you really can tailor you session to suit your preferences as well as your budget. People regularly play for pennies so it’s as good a place to practice as it is to compete for a big jackpot, especially given the help and advice guides available.
Bingo
Hills are a surprisingly well equipped destination for online bingo players. Being best known as an old school bookie, they don’t instantly conjure up the image of bingo players daubing their tickets, but their online bingo rooms are fully stocked and well equipped to look after anyone bonkers about bingo.
The lobby is a cheerful place full of pastel greens, blues and oranges, which genuinely brightens your mood and also makes the bingo rooms very easy to browse.
It’s also one of the best for browsing because you can order the games by price, game type, number of players, and prize, which means you can find exactly the sort of game you want. Fancy a quiet game with low ticket prices? Easy. Up for more socialising and the potential to win hundreds of pounds for a full house? Done.
There are lots of 90-ball, 75-ball, and 80-ball games, plus a 40-ball room and some specials to keep things interesting. This is all Playtech software too, including the side games in the bingo area.
Banking
Banking Method | Max/Min Deposit | Max/Min Withdrawal | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Debit Card | £5 | £5 | Up to 4 Hours |
PayPal | £10 | £10 | Up to 24 hours |
Neteller | £10 | £5 | Up to 24 hours |
Skrill | £10 | £5 | Up to 24 hours |
Paysafecard | £10 | £25 | By Bank Transfer |
Bank Transfer | £10 | £25 | 1-10 Days |
You certainly won’t be short of payment methods if you bet with William Hill. There are so many on the list that we had never heard of some of them.
They aren’t the quickest to process withdrawals with all methods (most are fine though) but if you sign up for a Plus Card that won’t be an issue, and if you use an e-wallet you won’t have to wait long anyway.
Low minimum deposits and withdrawals will be a welcome sight for those with smaller bank rolls, and generous maximums for those high rollers. No fees in sight either.
Features
On top of the useful stats and results features and the great selection of promotional offers on the Horses and other sports categories, there are a few other features which make your time at William Hill enjoyable and profitable:
TV & Radio
You can watch Bet TV for free although you can’t control what it is showing. It’s not quite the same thing as Watch Live which integrates with the betting interface, but it’s entertaining none the less and a great way to keep an eye on what else is going on. The great thing is that as you load different areas of the site Bet TV will keep running without issue.
As will WH Radio, which offers commentary on Horses, Greyhounds and in-play events throughout the day. This is also free to use and a great feature to add some excitement to the proceedings – it also feels a little bit nostalgic.
WH Radio is your key to the William Hill Podcast which uploads a few different episodes each day, with ambassadors like Robbie Savage previewing various sporting events and discussing possible outcomes and important factors.
Plus Card
The Plus Card allows you to seamlessly blend your real life bankroll with your online bankroll so that if your online bet is a winner, you can walk straight into your local branch of William Hill and withdraw the winnings in cash. No more waiting for them to process and transfer funds to your account; cash can be in your hand in seconds.
Equally, you can deposit to your online account or use your online funds to bet in shop, as well as cash out shop bets on your mobile. Essentially, it means that your money can be controlled and moved as you see fit at the time.
This also means that shop bets can potentially qualify for online only offers, plus, with 1,400 physical bookies countrywide you are never going to be far away from one.
Cash Out
This is a staple feature of the industry these days, and a company like William Hill would be seriously flagging if they didn’t support it.
Cash Out (or Cash In as it is called at this bookie) allows you some wiggle room with your bet so that if the scenario isn’t playing out as you had expected you can end the bet early at new odds. This can help you to save a little money instead of losing it all, or bag you a profit albeit a smaller one than if the bet had continued and won.
As an example: if you bet £10 that a match will end 2-2 and the current score is indeed 2-2 but one team looks like scoring, you might want to cash out to bank some profit. The price won’t be as good as the original, but it allows you to react to the given circumstances of an event and keeps the bet alive and active throughout. Much more interesting.
Partial Cash Out
Exactly the same premise as above, but instead of cashing out all of your bet, you cash out a portion of it. So, if we stick with the same 2-2 scenario, you might decide to Cash Out £5 of the bet as a safety precaution, but leave the other £5 in with a chance of winning at the original price.
Cash Out won’t always be available but the Cash Out symbol will alert you before you place the bet in the first place so you should be aware of what you are getting into.
Desktop Website
It can often feel like the website is as old as the betting company with some of these industry veterans; blocky interfaces, confusing lay outs and a musty smell. Not so with William Hill.
The desktop site retains a hint of the past with the logo and colour scheme giving off a classic traditional feel, but everything else is made for the modern bettor. Every inch of space has been put to good use with the interface spanning the full width of the screen giving each individual section plenty of room. This makes all of the information a doddle to process at a glance, which in turn aids usability no end.
Navigation too is a piece of cake with all of the usual options such as an A-Z of sports, as well as Popular Sports and Top Bets to use as quick links, and a search bar. Drop down menus are employed everywhere else to give punters an overview of their choices before they make them, keeping the user informed and in control. They have even managed to squeeze in a Betting TV box without it getting in the way or feeling cumbersome.
One of the most useful features works as follows: When you select a sports category a separate box is created containing all of the useful links specific to that category. So if you clicked Horse Racing, for example, the box might contain links to Future Races, Specials, Top Bets, Tote, Naps Table, Jockey/Trainer etc.
The site looks and feels very light and breezy to use, we ran into no loading issues at all and to be quite honest we are struggling to find room for improvement. William Hill was actually the first UK bookie to launch a website so maybe they have had a head start, but when you consider the sheer scale of the content they deliver, the fact that they can do so and make it look so easy in the process is quite an achievement.
Some of the credit must of course go to OpenBet who maintain the platform that the site has been built on. If you aren’t aware of OpenBet, they have been working in the sector since 1996 and have been named Sports Betting Supplier of the Year more times than any other company.
Mobile Website
A lot of bookies’ mobile websites are either scaled down versions of the desktop or almost identical to the app. For a while this is neither and it suffered because of it, but happily William Hill have thrown some money at their mobile product and now it’s a powerful and impressive bit of kit.
There is an app and a specialised mobile website, and you can jump from the sportsbook to the casino with ease or download apps specific to the product you want.
Collapsible menus save space and keep things neat and tidy, and access to all the most important features is immediately on hand; the Menu holds the A-Z while popular categories, top bets, and in-play fixtures are accessible from the home screen.
The in-play area doesn’t feel quite the same on mobile. Although stats and Watch Live are still available, it doesn’t transition as well as some other brands have managed. On the plus side, red and green colour coded odds allow for confusion free betting as the prices fluctuate.
Casino players can download one of the various William Hill apps (and they have one for everything) if they only play specific games, or use their device’s browser and access everything. Both options are quick and simple, so if you know how to use your device you will be able to figure it out. Once open, it looks much the same as it does on a desktop, although it is slightly less responsive and a little slower to load in our experience, but it looks great graphically and works fluidly once everything has initially loaded up.
There is a separate app for the Live Casino but all of Evolutions offerings are in there, whereas there are one or two of Playtech’s live games missing from the Casino app.
It is a perfectly functional mobile website whichever product you use, there are a few features missing but we are not suggesting that it will let you down in any way. In fact, when you account for just how much William Hill have had to cram into their mobile products they have done a remarkable job.
About
Poor old William Hill has been passed around more often than a Morrison’s shopping trolley. The company has been owned by numerous holdings and capital partners over the years, but their story first began in Birmingham in 1934, when William Hill himself started the business as a postal and telephone betting service at a time when gambling was still illegal in the UK.
By 1961 this was no longer the case, and 5 years later William Hill began to buy betting shops and acquire other existing small-time bookmakers, beginning a trend that would continue for a decade.
In 1970 William Hill himself retired, passing away a year later, and in Newmarket no less. At around the same time, Sears Holdings Groups purchased the company and began what would be a chain of new owners over the next 30 years.
Fast forward to 2002 and William Hill is floated on the London Stock Exchange and begins acquiring Greyhound stadiums, having already launched online back in 1998.
In 2005 they bought 624 betting offices from Stanley Leisure for £504 million making them briefly the biggest bookie in the UK – until the office of fair trading made them sell 78 of them due to concerns over anti-competitive practices.
It was at the end of 2008 when William Hill partnered with software company’s Playtech and Orbis (who would go on to become OpenBet) in a bid to breathe life into their dying online operations. As you can see from this review, ten years on and things seem to be going much better.
There have been many controversies in William Hill’s past, the most recent of which ending in 2018 after the company was found guilty of accepting large amounts of money linked to illegal activities and fined £6.2 million for the pleasure.
This doesn’t seem to worry punters, however, since William Hill currently owns 1,400 betting shops which are said to process over 1 million betting slips every single day, and more than 12,000 members of staff are employed by the company.
They are now back on track and can boast being the UK’s largest single brand, accounting for 25% of the market in the UK and Ireland, despite now being owned by 888. Still, not too shabby for a kid from Birmingham.
Read more about the company behind the brand on our William Hill company page.
Why Bet With William Hill?
Trying to pin William Hill down to a specific kind of bettor is difficult because they have covered almost every angle. Occasional gamblers will find odds in the top percentile on big fixtures as well as a fantastic range of markets to play with.
Professional gamblers can take advantage of that same depth of markets alongside useful stats and results services, both in-play and pre-game.
If you like to bet in store as well as online then the William Hill Plus card gives you all of the above as well as the flexibility to move funds between the real and virtual world in no time at all.
So, who won’t this website work for? If you can come up with an answer let us know.
Customer Support
We have to say, the help and support available from William Hill these days is exemplary. There was a time when it would have been fair to question how trustworthy the company was, but it’s safe to say those days have passed. The support team really know their onions, communicate clearly, and can be contacted by Live Chat 24/7.
You don’t get that much from some other online bookies, whereas William Hill goes even further by running a dedicated Twitter account and inviting feedback in whatever form you choose to give it, showing that they are open to listening to their customers’ ideas for improvement. We are all for good communication between bookie and punter and this open door policy, if you will, is great to see.
You’ll notice there is no email or phone support anymore (for online customers anyway, retail customers have a help number), but this is a choice based on effectiveness and customer preference rather than cost saving.
What’s more, the Help section is vastly superior. Well structured and easy to use, it offers guidance by way of a categorised and searchable FAQ with detailed answers and links to Contact if you are still stuck.
We feel very well looked after here.
Contact & Licence
If you can’t find a way to contact William Hill than chances are the problem isn’t them. They even have a dedicated Twitter account. If you need help, one of these methods should suit you.
- Live Chat – If you aren’t connected immediately you will be told how long your wait is, and the team are great. Live Chat opens in a new window full screen, which is novel.
- Email – You can try these if you like but they aren’t officially in use anymore: [email protected] or [email protected]
- Phone – Free from landlines and mobiles, 0870 51 81 715 is the number for retail queries, or 0330 123 9638 is for Plus Card queries. Neither will be able to help you with online queries though.
- @WillHillHelp – Running alongside the regular account is this dedicated support account. It’ manned 8am-11pm every day.
- Address – WHG (International) Ltd, 6/1 Waterport Place, Gibraltar, GX11 1AA
- UK Gambling Licence – 39225